Our story begins in 1902, at The Brookhants School for Girls. ISBN-13: 978-0062942852 | $27.99 USD | 623 pages | Historical Fiction/Horror/ComedyĪ highly imaginative and original horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girls-a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit.

There will never be too many books featuring gloriously messy women as far as I’m concerned.Danforth, Emily.

But that’s a very minor hitch in an otherwise great book. My one quibble is that the witty narrative voice, complete with fistfuls of footnotes, and the internet-ness gets a bit much sometimes. Two characters find themselves getting bits of insect stuck in their gum lines in two separate scenes and I wish I could erase those from my memory. Danforth knows how to ratchet up the tension in a scene and the hallucinating/delirious/madness/dream sequences are claustrophobically intense. The horror elements are primarily psychological (or are they?) with the occasional dip into the occult. All the characters are well drawn and none can be easily categorised, and it’s the friction in their tangled relationships with each other that drive the story forward. Danforth manages to capture all the exuberant, hyper-real, no-perspective, feeling of youth and, in the case of Alex and Libbie, their subsequent maturity. A host of young women scattered across time periods, all of them with way too many feelings that they can’t handle and don’t understand. The “look-at-me” structure is fun but it’s the characters that really made this book shine for me. And, I found myself thinking that 1) if this were adapted to the screen I would totally watch it and 2) I want to watch the movie they made in the book. The director isn’t making the movie they think they’re making, Harper is running ninja promotions on Instagram the whole time, Merritt is writing up the shenanigans on-set even as they’re making the movie, etc.Īnd, of course, we’re reading a novel about the whole schtick where the narrator constantly breaks the 4th wall to address the reader. Merritt’s book is being made into a movie, featuring movie-star Harper and underdog Audrey. In the present day, Merritt has written a book about the boarding school deaths.

The book is tied to a string of mysterious deaths which are woven through the narrative. In 1902, the girls at a boarding school run by Alex and Libby become obsessed with the diary of a young radical named Mary Maclane. I’ll try and untangle some of the plot in bullet points I like it when writers try to be clever and I like it even more when it works. There are so many meta layers in this book that I lost count.

Plain bad heroines book review