Despite its somewhat extravagant plot, The Rabbit Club offers what My Oxford Year cannot: an authentic portrayal of Oxford.

I recently reviewed the new Netflix movie My Oxford Year, which is a brainless story about an American woman pursuing a yearlong master’s degree at Oxford University, where she develops a romantic relationship with a graduate student who is also her terminally ill professor. I imagine that most viewers will find the movie frustrating because it seemingly has two different plots, the first focused on the experience of moving abroad for school and the second on a relationship strained by unfortunate circumstances (although at no point is it clear why they like each other, since all their conversations amount to lame teasing). However, I was particularly annoyed by the depiction of the university and its student culture. In My Oxford Year, every interaction is shallow, all comments are devoid of substance, and most strangely, the main character is treated by everyone as so noticeably foreign that she is almost unintelligible. I am happy to report, though, that the pop-culture representation of the American studying abroad in Oxford is rectified in the new novel The Rabbit Club, by Christopher J. Yates, now available in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Alistair “Ali” McCain arrives at Oxford University in the 1990s for a three-year undergraduate degree in literature. He was encouraged to apply by a high school teacher who gave him a copy of Brideshead Revisited, but he also has a deeply personal motive for studying in England: He hopes to meet his father, a famous British rock star who has a long list of estranged children. On campus, Ali quickly makes some friends, most of whom are also English-literature students. Unsurprisingly, the literature students are anti-capitalist and anti-elitist, while the girls specifically are capable of reading great works only through a feminist praxis. By contrast, Ali’s roommate William Wynn-Goode — an obvious caricature of Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Conservative Party politician and former member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s cabinet, whose time at Oxford overlapped with that of the author of The Rabbit Club — is a vaguely conservative aristocrat. (Wynn-Goode is more elitist than he is explicitly right-wing.) Over the course of their first year, Wynn-Goode puts Ali through the hazing process to join a mysterious secret society called the Rabbit Club, and things take a dark turn.

The Rabbit Club, like My Oxford Year, is an inaccurate representation of the university as it is today, but only insofar as dangerous “secret societies” have died. Instead, there’s now a thriving culture of “private clubs,” meaning social groups with a formal membership process that doesn’t require an oath of secrecy. Oxford University just isn’t really a place where students are subjected to cultish initiations; the closest equivalent is the regular pub nights that often involve too much alcohol.

Aside from these dramatic fictional embellishments for the sake of a somewhat extravagant plot, the minor details in The Rabbit Club are rather accurate observations about Oxford University — the buildings, the professors, the students, and the culture more broadly. Student life is depicted appropriately, with every minor inconvenience and success serving as an excuse for a pub trip, while cigarettes are exchanged as freely as handshakes. The dialogue is believable with respect to its content as well as linguistically faithful to particular accents and weirdly specific jargon you’re likely to encounter on campus; characters often interject with random contributions of obscure knowledge that is only vaguely relevant. It’s obvious that the book was written by someone who is actually familiar with the campus dynamics, since some details would be known only by an “insider.” For example, a student mentions that she flashed a big smile to the college porter and apparently “passed the mental health test” that granted her access to the college tower. (Today, a certain Oxford college doesn’t allow students to enter its tower during examination season, out of fears that the stress might motivate a suicide attempt.) The Rabbit Club therefore offers what My Oxford Year cannot: an authentic portrayal of Oxford.

Unlike My Oxford Year’s American main character, Anna, who seems perplexed by every single thing she encounters in England, Ali’s moments of disorientation in Oxford are similar to the ones I experienced upon arrival. Even after the happy realization that he’s old enough to drink in England, Ali heads to the pub and reaches for his passport as he asks the bartender, “Don’t you need to ID me first?” Ali’s anxiety before the tutorial sessions, as well as his discomfort when being intellectually interrogated by a professor, are all familiar feelings. He gets a modicum of praise only once he has written a feminist-leaning essay, which is to be expected of English-literature departments across the West. As I did, Ali slowly learns that class in England is somewhat fixed by circumstances of birth, and self-generated wealth enables only a bit of upward mobility.

My issues with the book? I would have found it more believable if the rock-star dad had been merely rich and famous rather than ridiculously rich and famous. The references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are a bit overwrought and could have been subtler. Parts of the ending were a too extravagant for my taste. A few of the minor subplots were underdeveloped, and not every character’s motive is clear. I recently finished my time as a conservative Oxford University student, so I didn’t love how the conservative Oxford students were often portrayed as the bad guys. However, the book as a whole was relatively politically balanced, and the left-wing literature students are covertly ridiculed: They decry elitism while reveling in the luxury of attending one of the most elite institutions in the world, and the feminist girls in particular have laughably simplistic interpretations of literature. Overall, The Rabbit Club was a light read — complete with pleasant prose, an appropriate amount of metaphorical language, moments of humor, and enough suspense to keep me interested through the end — that I enjoyed working through by the pool. But its greatest value is in providing an authentic representation of the Oxford atmosphere that has served as the setting for many works across many media.