The Furry Boarding School (Russian: Меховой интернат) is a 1989 children's novel by Eduard Uspensky.
Lusya, a ten-year-old schoolgirl, discovers that a long-abandoned country house is now home to a furry boarding school: sapient, talking students of various animal species, their headmaster, a badger, and their caretaker, a dormouse. The headmaster offers Lusya a teaching position (as a teacher of Russian Language and Good Behavior) at the school, believing that animal children will get along with human children much better than with human adults.
Lusya starts teaching at the school every Sunday, getting along wonderfully with the little animals if sometimes astounded by their Insane Troll Logic. In the meantime, on weekdays. she struggles with the problems at her own school, since she is a C student and rather annoyed by both her classmates and teachers.
The book contains examples of:
- Affectionate Nickname:
- Lusya has one for her favorite student, Phew Scarlet Tongue the weasel, mentally calling her Lacquer Lightning for her incredible quickness.
- Furry Mechanic, the school headmaster, tells his friends to simply call him "dir", short for "director".
- Bad People Abuse Animals: The closest the book has to a villain is Temnotyur (meaning "unshaven" in the animal language, real name Nikolay Savelyev), a hunter and poacher.
- Bittersweet Ending: Lusya has befriended her animal students, grown as a person and become a much better pupil herself. However, the boarding school, threatened by hunters and bureaucracy, is forced to evacuate, leaving Lusya a farewell letter and two seeds that would grow into magic flowers that would allow the animals to talk to her. They hope that humanity will be ready to befriend the animal land by the next generation.
- Cannot Tell a Lie: The little animals are absolutely truthful, and the headmaster is very worried it can get them into trouble with human criminals.
- Cassandra Truth: Kira Tarasova is such a famous liar that when she tells her classmates about the furry boarding school, nobody believes her.
- The Fashionista: Each of the schools in the book has an example.
- In the human school, Karina Marinoshvili is so obsessed with dressing fashionably her grandmother is forced to work three jobs as a cleaning-lady to be able to buy her the things she wants (Karina tells her that expensive clothes are part of the school uniform).
- In the animal school, Tsoki-Tsoki the squirrel is always dressed very smartly.
- Furry Confusion: The other human employee at the furry boarding school, Uncle Kostya, owns an ordinary non-sapient dog.
- Gender-Blender Name: Snow Queen the stoat is in fact male.
- Gone Horribly Right: The animals place pleasant mood-inducing machines on the trees around the school to protect it. The district becomes famous for its wonderful fresh air, and drunkards and petty criminals flock towards it, meaning that the slightest malfunction of the machines can lead to disastrous results.
- Talking Animal: An entire boarding school of them.
