I’m planning to reread this later in the year, and will write more then, but for now, I love LOVED it – a stunning spin on ‘dark academia’ tropes, a sI’m planning to reread this later in the year, and will write more then, but for now, I love LOVED it – a stunning spin on ‘dark academia’ tropes, a story that turns itself upside down and shakes everything out. Not only is it a story about privilege and obsession and envy, it gets to the heart of something about why we are so endlessly fascinated by these stories. An instant favourite, to sit next to The Party, The Bellwether Revivals and Engleby....more
I will never get bored of books like this. A zingy headrush of a campus novel, Stargazer is set mostly at a lakeside university in Ontario, Canada, anI will never get bored of books like this. A zingy headrush of a campus novel, Stargazer is set mostly at a lakeside university in Ontario, Canada, and follows the friendship – and rivalry – between two girls, both extremely wealthy. The first, Diana, is from a loveless family, made jealous and resentful by her cold parents and sadistic brother; the second, Aurelle, is adored, but unwillingly famous due to her celebrity mother, and desperate to escape into anonymity. Skipping back and forth between the genesis of the girls’ friendship and their later notoriety, Petrou manages the plot’s progression with enviable skill – you have a sense Diana and Aurelle become infamous without knowing exactly why until the end, and it’s always intriguing, never too much, never too slow. It’s set in the early-to-mid-1990s, and features the ideal amount of ‘period detail’: enough to evoke the era, not so much that it overpowers the story.
While reading it I barely came up for air, totally absorbed in this world: the dream forest ‘cottage’ (actually a mansion), canoeing across the lake to classes, stargazing, parties, art. It’s delicious to watch the two girls transform into fully realised (or fully subjugated) versions of themselves, and the character development is just right. It’s believable that Diana, the bitter outsider, would become ruthless and enigmatic; would be admired without ever really integrating. It’s believable that pampered Aurelle’s clingy, babyish tendencies would transmute into a cowed, pathetic misery.
Stargazer is one of those novels that seems excellent when you’re reading it, but even more impressive when you step back and think about it. What Petrou does with the narrative is like sleight of hand; it’s so deftly structured that I can’t quite see how it was made to work so perfectly. And Diana Martin – controlled, laconic, terrifyingly driven – is my favourite literary character of the year so far. This is one of those books that feels like it should have a fandom. Hopefully, it soon will.
As long as I’ve had a Goodreads account, I’ve been keeping track of books with similarities to my long-standing favourite novel, Donna Tartt’s The SecAs long as I’ve had a Goodreads account, I’ve been keeping track of books with similarities to my long-standing favourite novel, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I have a shelf for them, called secret-history-esque. Nowadays, however, these books have a more widely recognised appellation – ‘dark academia’ – and there’s a steady supply of novels seemingly created specifically to fit its parameters.
The Cloisters is one such book. This may seem a bit unfair, but I truly don’t mean it as a criticism when I say it could have been written to order for this trend. It has the scholarly setting: The Cloisters, a museum of medieval art and architecture in New York City. The outsider protagonist – Ann, a naive but driven graduate with a love of ancient languages (thanks to her autodidact father) – whose wealthy, well-educated new colleagues seem to offer a ticket to a world of learning, society and glamour beyond her wildest dreams. The uneven, arguably toxic friendship between Ann and the charismatic Rachel. There are esoteric themes and motifs: fate, tarot cards, botanical drugs. It even has the portentous ‘if only I’d known then what I know now...’ prologue beloved of the genre. Finally, of course, there’s a mysterious death or two.
Because I seek out this type of story, I’ve read books exactly like this before. While the tarot angle is interesting, The Cloisters doesn’t really do much that feels new. But I’ve writtenbefore about how much I enjoy this plot structure as long as it hits all the right notes, and the familiar formula has yet to lose its lustre for me. The Cloisters is executed perfectly: a heady book to get lost in, a perfect summer novel. The atmosphere of the setting, with its verdant gardens and myriad hidden corners, is undeniably intoxicating.
With a tangled web of relationships at its heart, this book reminded me of ‘coming of age in the big city’ narratives like Sweetbitter as well as its more obvious kin in the ‘dark academia’ niche (especially this year’s Stargazer). I’m glad I read it in August, the perfect month for revelling in such an unabashedly indulgent tale.
I received an advance review copy of The Cloisters from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Like Tara Isabella Burton’s wonderful debut Social Creature, The World Cannot Give is a story about obsession – how it’s an endless vista unfolding anLike Tara Isabella Burton’s wonderful debut Social Creature, The World Cannot Give is a story about obsession – how it’s an endless vista unfolding and then, eventually, a prison. It’s also a story about faith, and transcendence, and how easy it is to locate the numinous in someone or something you love, and how dangerous that can be.
Laura Stearns is obsessed with a writer, Sebastian Webster, and his only book, All Before Them, particularly its setting: St. Dunstan’s, a private school on the windswept Maine coast. So consuming is Laura’s passion that, at sixteen, she manages to persuade her parents to transfer her to the school. There, she falls gladly into its old-fashioned rituals – particularly the long-standing, albeit now controversial, custom of Evensong – and transfers her infatuation to Virginia Strauss, the pious, exacting choir president. Discovering that Virginia also loves Webster, with his objections to the ‘sclerotic modern world’ and desire for a ‘shipwreck of the soul’, malleable Laura is drawn into the rigorously self-contained social circle of the choir as well as Virginia’s own obsessions: her intense fervour for God, her punishing early-morning runs.
There is so little about these young people’s lives outside the school; when they step off its campus, they may as well step off the edge of the earth. There’s so little outside the core group, even – when I visualised the campus I couldn’t help but see it empty aside from the main characters. In this way the narrative both creates the impression of a faintly otherworldly setting, and reproduces within itself the hyper-focused, enveloping smallness of Laura’s obsessions.
Tara Isabella Burton once again proves she can write on two different levels simultaneously. (I am beginning to realise this is what she does: takes a plot that looks tropey on the surface, and runs rings around it.) Just as you can read Social Creature as nothing but a thriller about a toxic friendship if you choose to, The World Cannot Give passes muster as a YA book – I wouldn’t have a problem recommending this to younger readers. The sentences are crisp and concise, the voice controlled, and if the plot sometimes veers towards the hysterical, it’s only appropriate that it does so (in the sense that all teenage experiences are inherently hysterical).
For the adult reader, it is an experience filled with aching nostalgia, terror, sadness, a book to make you feel fury and sympathy and pity for your younger self, mourn the loss of innocence, weep for all the potential futures lost, envy the power an obsession could once hold. Life is so long, and youth is so short, and I wanted Laura to be able to hold on to the things she exalted for longer, even as I knew it was bad for her.
The world Burton creates here is an enchantment, suffused with glorious melodrama: the school and its students all slightly exaggerated, the climax an explosion of histrionic misery. I left it behind reluctantly, feeling dazed, tender, and yes, a little more World-Historical.
I received an advance review copy of The World Cannot Give from the publisher through NetGalley.
The first time I started reading Belzhar, I didn't seriously intend to finish it. In faPandemic rereads #2*
This is the story of the worst book I love.
The first time I started reading Belzhar, I didn't seriously intend to finish it. In fact, I was reading it as a joke, because I had heard a lot about how bad it was. I expected to read a sample, laugh at how terrible it was, and move on. Instead, I connected with it almost instantly. I found myself interested enough to keep reading. And I finished it, and I had to admit to myself that I'd really liked it. There were parts I'd read back over repeatedly and copied down into a notebook. When I recently read an adult novel (Catherine House) that captures some of the same feelings I got from Belzhar, I was compelled to go back and reread it, properly, again.
This is a YA novel about a girl called Jam. I love the way it begins: I was sent here because of a boy. His name was Reeve Maxfield, and I loved him and then he died, and almost a year passed and no one knew what to do with me. Jam is 15, and Reeve, a British exchange student, is her first love. But, as those first few sentences tell us, he dies suddenly and she enters a lengthy depressive episode, refusing to get out of bed or speak to anyone. After months of this, her parents decide to send her to The Wooden Barn, a school in Vermont which markets itself as a sort of retreat for 'emotionally fragile, highly intelligent' young people.
'Belzhar' is a play on the title of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, which becomes a key text for Jam during her time at The Wooden Barn. But the most relevant Plath reference is her poem 'Mad Girl's Love Song', which is so pertinent that I feel like it might've been the inspiration for the whole thing. Meanwhile, the plot roughly resembles a junior version of The Secret History: Jam and four other students are recruited to the exclusive 'Special Topics in English' class; their mysterious, eccentric teacher encourages them to write about themselves in antique notebooks. They find that the act of doing so results in short, intense visions – or, possibly, supernatural experiences – in which they seem to return to life before their trauma.
I connected with Belzhar and Jam almost immediately. I was around Jam's age when I first experienced depression and suicidal ideation, and like her, these problems initially manifested around my feelings for a boy. Being 'in love' consumed my entire self and took me to some very dark places. So I found the power of her feelings and her sustained period of grief entirely believable. There's a large plot twist near the end of the book, one many readers hate and some find distasteful, since it reveals Jam's 'trauma' as trivial in comparison to her classmates'. My reaction was different: I find Jam's story emotionally powerful precisely because of this twist, and I felt more sorry and sad for her when it was revealed. The truth drags her loneliness into the light, and that's what packs the emotional punch for me.
I like the fact that the teenagers in Belzhar are realistic teenagers. Despite being chosen for an elite class, the Special Topics students don't behave like the precocious, emotionally mature, world-weary and cynical teens so often found in YA media. They're moody, uncooperative and awkward. Their discussion of Plath is basic and shallow, yet it helps them begin to understand themselves. They're fucked-up 15-year-olds, not postgrads, and they act like it.
There are still things about the story that I find silly. There's no explanation of how exactly The Wooden Barn operates as a school for 'troubled' teens when said teens receive no actual therapy or treatment. The supposedly 'typically British' details of Reeve's character are ridiculous (though, given the nature of the twist, I think an argument can be made that this is deliberate). But over time, even the edges of these things have been softened, and I can look at them from an affectionate distance, accepting that while they're maybe not very good choices, they don't actually make the book bad for me.
I love it, in spite of the flaws. I see my teen self reflected in it, and I find it recognisable and real both in a very general sense (memories are always a story we tell ourselves) and in ways extremely specific to me. It's a YA book that was published when I was 30, and it's a book lots of people dislike, but it's a part of me now, and I'll keep going back to it, I'm sure.
* Pandemic reread #1 was Based on a True Story, but as it's only a few years since I first read it, I don't have anything to add to my existing review.
(4.5) This was the second book within a couple of weeks that I completely underestimated. As with Catherine House, I read the blurb, recognised attrac(4.5) This was the second book within a couple of weeks that I completely underestimated. As with Catherine House, I read the blurb, recognised attractive keywords – ‘ruined manor house’, ‘resentment, lies and a terrible betrayal’ – and settled in for what I assumed would be an enjoyable retread of some favourite themes, something fun and light to while away a sunny afternoon. But Before the Ruins is more than the sum of its parts.
It starts in the present day. A woman named Andy receives a phone call from her friend Peter’s mother; Peter, it seems, is missing – or at least, he’s not contacting his parents. This sets Andy off on a search for him. More importantly, it prompts her to think back to the events of 20 years ago, a key period in both their lives. In these flashbacks, Andy and Peter are 18 years old and unlikely best friends: Andy the daughter of a neglectful alcoholic, her life so far defined by abuse; Peter comfortably middle class, the son of a vicar, bound for Oxford. That summer they, along with their friend Em and Andy’s boyfriend Marcus, spend a lot of time hanging around an abandoned manor house. They meet charismatic runaway David, with whom both Andy and Peter fall a little bit in love. Perhaps incongruously for older teens, the whole group get caught up in a half-serious game: searching for a priceless diamond necklace, the subject of a local scandal in the 1930s, and reputedly still hidden somewhere in the house’s grounds.
Lots of books play with themes like these: the outsider in a golden group, the deadly desperation to belong, the disastrous event that rends it all asunder. The Poison Tree, A Fatal Inversion and Bitter Orange all came to mind while I was reading it. Plus there are plenty of fun-but-forgettable takes, like The Truants. What, then, makes Before the Ruins in particular worth reading? It’s the characters, Andy especially, and the richness – the scope – of the story. Andy feels like a fully realised person and seems to have about a hundred different layers to her. The plot takes many unexpected turns, by which I don’t mean ‘twists’ but diversions which add context and enhance the story. As with A Fatal Inversion, there’s a lot of detail that doesn’t technically need to be included but which ultimately makes the book far more engrossing and rewarding than it might otherwise have been.
And then there’s the love story. I am not a lover of love stories (so to speak); generally speaking, I actively avoid anything labelled as romance, and often roll my eyes when romantic subplots are jammed into books or films where they aren’t necessary. But the love story in Before the Ruins... it’s just wonderfully done. I fully believed in the bond between these characters, and to my own surprise, I found myself hoping fiercely that they would get a happy ending.
The things that first drew me to Before the Ruins proved unimportant in the end; it’s superficially a story about a manor house, a betrayal, a game, etc., but truly it’s about something much more fundamental than that: the complex bonds of friendship and love, and the long-lasting reverberations of our early lives.
I received an advance review copy of Before the Ruins from the publisher through NetGalley.
When I'm lining up forthcoming books I want to read, I tend to think of some as definites and some as maybes. I had Catherine House on the 'maybe' pilWhen I'm lining up forthcoming books I want to read, I tend to think of some as definites and some as maybes. I had Catherine House on the 'maybe' pile. I thought: elite university; newcomer with a secret; idyllic environment in which Things Are Not As They Seem – these are themes and tropes I like, but they've been done a million times, and there's a good chance this will bring nothing new to the table. Boy, was I wrong about that: this is such a rich and intoxicating novel, and it turned out to be the perfect escapist read for these dark times.
Catherine House is an exclusive institution – 'not a college, exactly', but something similar; a 'community of minds'. It's shrouded in mystery, but also well-respected, and has produced renowned inventors, prizewinning artists, and two US Presidents. Students choose a 'concentration', but the classes they take are esoteric, with titles like 'Literature of War' and 'Electricities'. Catherine provides clothes, toiletries and lavish meals as well as education and accommodation. The catch is that, for the three years they study there, Catherine residents cannot leave the campus or communicate with the outside world. This suits our narrator, Ines, just fine. She's on the run from a troubled past; for her, the ability to hide is just as appealing as Catherine's exceptional reputation.
There's also a science fictional element. Catherine is home to a highly secretive and experimental research discipline known as 'new materials'. Working with 'plasm', these researchers can – so the rumours say – make broken objects whole again. Places in new materials classes are highly sought after, but other students learn little of what they involve. Even so, thermometer-like instruments called 'plasm pins' are used on people too, seemingly to draw out memories and/or reconfigure one's attitude.
It all adds up to an exciting, addictive confection. I sailed through it, totally immersed. It is easy to read, but quite beautifully written, balancing on that line between gorgeous and overly whimsical. Every description of food is indulgent, and the details of Ines's golden days made me ache to be there. Ines is an interesting choice of protagonist: stories like this are typically narrated by an outsider, but she's very much part of the in-crowd – someone who really finds her place at Catherine and seems to be accepted and liked by everyone. I enjoyed what Thomas did with her character: giving depth to someone who, on the surface, is not all that likeable or relatable; cleverly making us understand that her frame of perception is being shifted by outside forces, all while holding us within it.
Catherine House has a lot in common with Mona Awad's Bunny: it's less gory, but the wild strangeness and lush language are similar. There are also shades of Lara Williams' Supper Club (all that sumptuous food) and, as the sci-fi ingredient, Sara Flannery Murphy's The Possessions. It's lovely and weird and abundant, and I enjoyed it a lot.
I received an advance review copy of Catherine House from the publisher through NetGalley.
This is the third Barbara Vine book I've read (after Asta’s Book and The Minotaur), and I love the richness of her stories. I've definitely said tThis is the third Barbara Vine book I've read (after Asta’s Book and The Minotaur), and I love the richness of her stories. I've definitely said this about other books, but A Fatal Inversion strikes me as such an old-fashioned mystery – slow-moving, painstakingly detailed. It really made me think about how quickly our (readers' in general) perceptions of genre shift; I struggle to imagine this being published under the banner of 'psychological thriller' or even 'crime' these days; too many scenes that drag and meander, too much about the stuffy lives of upper-middle-class Brits. Yet those were the things I liked most about it.
The plot is of a type that sounds unoriginal now, but doubtless was more of a novelty when A Fatal Inversion was published: the 'group of hedonistic young people inhabiting an old country house' setup. It's the unusually hot summer of 1976, and 19-year-old Adam Verne-Smith has inherited his great-uncle Hilbert's mansion, Wyvis Hall – much to the chagrin of his father, who had been toadying to Hilbert for years in the hope of securing the house. (This is the sort of detail A Fatal Inversion has in spades. There are pages and pages devoted to this family spat, which has nothing much to do with the main plot, but adds fascinating texture to the characters.) On a whim, Adam decides to stay at the Hall over the summer with his friend Rufus. They are eventually joined by a hippyish couple, Shiva and Vivien, and a strange girl named Zosie, whom Adam falls in love/lust with. Ten years later, things are very different: the former friends have sworn never to speak again, and think of the house with horror, guilt and fear.
We have an idea of why, because in the opening scene, the couple now inhabiting Wyvis Hall uncover a human skeleton while burying their dog in what is ostensibly a pet graveyard. We learn early on that the body was a woman's, so the story is necessarily told from Adam, Rufus and Shiva's perspectives; Vine must keep us in the dark about what becomes of Vivien, Zosie and a handful of incidental female characters. This is the weakest aspect of A Fatal Inversion, as the narrative sometimes ties itself in knots trying to explain why none of the men will countenance the idea of contacting [unspecified female character]. Nonetheless, the story overall retains its strange fascination.
The characters are an awful lot; even the nicest of them are no more than vaguely likeable. Most are either downright obnoxious (the men) or annoying (the women). And yet the way Vine writes them is so persuasive that I wanted them to get away with it! The scenes of that summer at Wyvis Hall – dubbed 'Ecalpemos' ('someplace' in reverse) by Adam – are peculiar and hazy, befitting the status this short period of time holds in the characters' minds. Vine depicts the power of memories with stunning precision: there are several fantastic moments in which a scene is suddenly interrupted, the perspective snaps back to reality, and we realise that what we have been reading is an individual's recollection, not objective fact.
It often seems like nothing much is happening in A Fatal Inversion, or things are moving too slowly, or the story is looping back on itself. The writing is so good, though, that I was happy to go along with whatever it was describing, even if it (seemingly) did nothing to advance the plot. This slow-burn approach also makes it all the more effective when a twist or revelation does come. The ending is delightfully satisfying, too, with a little sting in its tail.
I had been saving this for a sunny day, and I read it on a sunny day, and it was perfect; my memories of it will forever be infused with a sort of gloI had been saving this for a sunny day, and I read it on a sunny day, and it was perfect; my memories of it will forever be infused with a sort of glow that could've come from the weather or from the story – perhaps a combination of both. The Truants is another Secret-History-esque campus novel, this one set at the University of East Anglia, where deliberately bland protagonist Jess gets close to a lecturer she idolises and becomes embroiled in a thorny love triangle. (You know the drill, and you probably know from that sentence whether you'll want to read this or not.) It's a formula that rarely fails to engage me, and this is a good treatment of it, following the tried-and-tested beats and adding just enough spikes of excitement to keep you guessing. Reading it in one long, glorious gulp is the best way to go: it's difficult to believe in some of the characters and their behaviour, but for a few engrossing hours I was able to set all that aside and just soak up the fantastic storytelling.
I received an advance review copy of The Truants from the publisher through Edelweiss.
Samantha is a graduate student with writer's block. She's from a poor background and doesn't really fit in at moneyed Warren University, where her fouSamantha is a graduate student with writer's block. She's from a poor background and doesn't really fit in at moneyed Warren University, where her four workshop partners have formed an insular clique. They call themselves the Bunnies – they literally all call each other 'Bunny' – and their conversations are studded with declarations of love, cliched Instagram-hashtag phrases and sycophantic compliments on the brilliance and originality of one another's work. From the sidelines, Samantha finds it nauseating, even as she nurses a deep envy.
Something's off about Warren from the beginning. Though it's an Ivy League school, its environs are plagued by frequent incidences of extreme violence (random decapitations, for example). It made me think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sunnydale – with all the weirdness erupting around Warren, there has to be something Hellmouth-ish about this place. As seen through Samantha's eyes, the Bunnies are putting on a grotesque pantomime act as simpering sorority sisters, their cutesy, indulgent personalities taken to such extremes that they cross over into horror. And when Samantha is finally invited to join the club, she discovers exactly how far and how deep that horror goes.
The main problem with Bunny is Samantha's best friend, Ava. The way she speaks to Samantha is, I guess, intended as appealingly blunt – an antidote to the Bunnies' cloying, insincere sweetness – but it just comes off as nasty most of the time. An 'art school drop-out' who carries a flask of alcohol labelled 'Drink Me', says things like 'the breeze is my lover' and goes around wearing a fishnet veil, she's basically the 10 most insufferable hipsters you've ever met combined into one person. As it turns out, there are reasons for Ava's bluntness and clicheness, but I'm not convinced her appearances are meant to be as irritating as I found them.
On the other hand, the Bunnies are ostensibly the villains, but they're great, such fun to read about. A mean girl clique subverted; identikit teen-drama bitches given agency, wit and dark appetites. They may be awful, but they're awful in such novel ways – airheads who are fiercely intelligent, saccharine child-women who revel in power and blood – that I loved them. The hallucinatory chapter in which Samantha submits to the Bunnies' hivemind is probably the best segment of the book: trippy, dreamlike, creepy as fuck. I wanted more of the Bunnies, more of Samantha-and-the-Bunnies, and less Samantha-on-her-own, less Ava. (Preferably no Ava at all.)
The blurb positions Bunny as 'The Vegetarian meets Heathers', which is maybe more useful than accurate: the reference to The Vegetarian serves as a handy indicator of how incredibly weird it is, but tells you nothing about the story. Personally, I'd say Bunny reminded me of Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics crossed with the craziest, most far-fetched parts of David Mitchell's Slade House, and I'd be inclined to reference Buffy and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina instead of Heathers. It also made me think of Katie Lowe's The Furies, which in some ways is the inverse of this novel – grimly, disgustingly real where Bunny is all bizarro Technicolor – but both are about young women experimenting with black magic, and both are full to bursting with lush, overblown prose.
It's just so much, but in a good way. And I would love to see a film or TV adaptation. My mouth is watering just imagining the luxuriant excess and creative gore of this story on screen.
I received an advance review copy of Bunny from the publisher through Edelweiss.
(4.5) In a run-down seaside town somewhere in England lives Violet, an unhappy and isolated 16-year-old. She is the only survivor of a car crash that (4.5) In a run-down seaside town somewhere in England lives Violet, an unhappy and isolated 16-year-old. She is the only survivor of a car crash that killed her father and little sister; in the aftermath, her mother withdraws into a numb state of grief, barely able to function. Violet's only desire is to escape. But a huge insurance settlement opens a different kind of door: Violet is to study for her A Levels at a private girls' school, Elm Hollow Academy.
There, she meets the girls who will become her clique. There's aloof Alex, quiet Grace, and the grungily glamorous scholarship girl, Robin, who introduces Violet to cigarettes, drugs, older boys and... witchcraft. For Elm Hollow has a dark past, from the burning of an accused witch on the premises in the 17th century, to the disappearance of student Emily Frost – Robin’s best friend – the previous year. Though Violet is warned away from them by others, her status as one of the clique is secured when she's invited to be part of an exclusive study group by Annabel, a charismatic art teacher.
On the surface, it might seem like there's nothing particularly new here. (Indeed, as I've mentioned before, I feel the world has more than enough 'girls behaving badly' stories.) Yet something about this snared me immediately. Part of its genius is the unlovely setting. Another part is leading with that: the first three paragraphs of the first chapter are devoted to sketching a bleak portrait of the crumbling, neglected town, 'the kind of place people came to die', complete with grey beaches, shabby arcades and 'pavilions caked in bird shit and graffiti'. We immediately understand that, even for the relatively privileged students of Elm Hollow, there is precious little glamour to be found in such a place.
Violet narrates from an adult perspective, trying to pick apart her memories of this formative year. As teenagers, the girls are convinced they have summoned mighty spirits of vengeance – the Greek Furies. This perceived power leads them to devise ever-more cruel methods of punishment for their 'enemies'. Two decades later, Violet can scarcely understand what was and wasn't real. Her adult perspective is crucial, especially in the second half of the book, when events spiral so far out of control they barely seem credible. Is our narrator remembering correctly, or simply reinforcing the wild imaginings of a traumatised 16-year-old?
The Furies isn't subtle. The prose can get a little too purple; some of the metaphors and similes could do with being cut. But honestly, I kind of loved how overblown it all was. At one point, Violet uses the phrase ‘gorgeous, blooming immensity’, which is a perfect way to describe the story itself. The way everything starts coming apart at the end... there's a sex scene late in the book that’s completely disgusting, viscerally horrible, and it seems to make plain an undercurrent of decay that has been growing stronger since the beginning.
This novel is alive with the vigour and liberty of adolescence. It’s also streaked with the grime and nastiness of the very same thing. Terror, obsession, feigned nonchalance, narcissism, the first pangs of nostalgia – heady ingredients combined into something addictive, awful and wonderful, a riveting story set in a fictional world that both repulsed and entranced me. I loved it. I loved getting lost in it.
Sophia's life in London is a bit of a mess, and after an ill-advised hook-up with a married colleague that threatens to jeopardise her career, she fleSophia's life in London is a bit of a mess, and after an ill-advised hook-up with a married colleague that threatens to jeopardise her career, she flees to her parents' country home. There, she finds an unimaginably horrifying scene: her mother has repeatedly stabbed her father, leaving him in a coma, before taking her own life. Sophia can't believe her mum, Nina, could do this, but the police confirm they are treating the case as an attempted murder-suicide.
In the aftermath of this shocking event, Sophia finds out Nina has written a book – a memoir. Not only that; she's got a publishing deal. Thereafter, the bulk of the narrative is made up of extracts from Nina's memoir, and alongside Sophia, we learn the hitherto-unknown tale of her past. After dropping out of her studies at Cambridge circa 1989, Nina becomes part of a commune named Morningstar, led by charismatic rock star Aaron Kessler. She is quickly drawn into a carefree, hedonistic way of life and an intoxicating relationship with Aaron. But this idyll can't last, and the fallout will reverberate over decades, ultimately wending its way to Sophia in the present day.
I liked Everything Is Lies, but I think it says a lot that I can remember very little about it less than a week after finishing the book. As with Callaghan's debut Dear Amy, I can't shake the impression the author has been asked to shape her narrative in a certain way, the better to make the resulting book slot into the domestic thriller market. There's a lot to appreciate in Nina's story, and with more detail and care, this could make a compelling novel in its own right – something in the vein of Linda Grant's excellent Upstairs at the Party. The murder-suicide part doesn't really need to be there, and the present-day storyline about Sophia's job is completely redundant.
I probably wouldn't have finished reading this if I wasn't on holiday, and that's how I'd recommend it – fine as a throwaway holiday read; otherwise, there are better versions of this story you could seek out. As well as Upstairs at the Party, try The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly, The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood, The Predictions by Bianca Zander, or The House at Midnight by Lucie Whitehouse.
I received an advance review copy of Everything Is Lies from the publisher through NetGalley.
Louise is twenty-nine and struggling in New York, and they say if you haven't made it in New York by
We cannot be known and loved at the same time.
Louise is twenty-nine and struggling in New York, and they say if you haven't made it in New York by thirty, you never will. She has three jobs, a shitty apartment and no friends to speak of. Until, through one of her SAT tutor ads, she comes into contact with Lavinia – a charismatic bohemian whirlwind. Lavinia is six years younger, rich and beautiful. Lavinia goes to fabulous parties. Lavinia has friends with connections. Lavinia is writing a novel. Lavinia goes skinny-dipping in the Hudson in winter. Lavinia finds 1920s vintage flapper dresses in the street and strips off then and there to put them on.
Lavinia is, of course, an absolute fucking nightmare. But they need each other – Louise needs a leg up into the world she aches to be a part of, and Lavinia needs a reverent acolyte – and they love each other, in their own twisted ways. However, there's the problem of Rex, Lavinia's childhood sweetheart, who (in typically dramatic style) she has placed on a pedestal as the only man she has ever loved, will ever love. When she first meets him, Louise doesn't know any of this, and by then it may already be too late.
There's a reason people are able to function, in this world, as social creatures, and a good part of that reason is that there are a lot of questions you're better off not knowing the answer to, and if you're smart you won't even ask.
If you have read the blurb and are familiar with the books Social Creature compares itself to, and you pay attention to the hints Burton drops throughout, the way this story goes is not going to be a big surprise to you. And if that's an issue – if you want to be surprised by the turns of the plot rather than by luminous writing, electric scenes, fine details – you might want to skip it. Personally, I could have accurately sketched out what would happen before I started the book, and I was still absolutely rapt.
"I know what everybody thinks of me." [Mimi] wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. "But what's the alternative? Not loving the people you love?" She laughs a little. "Is that really what we're supposed to do?"
Social Creature is about getting what you want – and the emptiness that follows. It's about what happens to desire and consent when a person is driven chiefly by aspiration and idolatry. It's about how transformative and exhilarating one great party can be when you're intoxicated, and how grimy and hackneyed that same party looks when you're sober. The narration, with its knowing asides to the reader, reminded me a lot of Sweetbitter – actually, if someone swore to me this was Stephanie Danler writing under a pseudonym, I'd believe it. This is a story that knows its coked-up New York party girls are a cliche, knows you're in on the joke. If you like schadenfreude, you'll love this.
Nothing in this city changes, and every party is the same, and every bar is the same and every Friday night is just like the Friday night that came before it, and the same photographers take the same pictures of the same people at the opera and the same passwords open the same speakeasies like skeleton keys and every single fucking piano bar in the whole fucking city plays "New York, New York" at the end of the night.
A couple of quibbles: 1) I wish the narrative/characters didn't so often say/think 'fat' when what they mean is 'anything other than underweight'. (I know this attitude is representative of the milieu the characters inhabit; I just don't think it's necessary here. We'd get how shallow and horrible it all is anyway.) 2) The cover design is rubbish. Honestly, that was the best they could come up with for a story this dazzling? I'll be crossing my fingers for a brilliant paperback cover and waiting until then to buy my physical copy.
And I will buy a physical copy, because I want to have this book to hand. This is the sort of story I could read a hundred times (figuratively, as in I could read versions of this plot from now until the end of time and always enjoy them, but also literally, as in I could happily read this book over and over again). Social Creature is a treat. It glitters like broken glass but it slips down like a champagne cocktail.
I received an advance review copy of Social Creature from the publisher through NetGalley.
A scrappy outsider accepted, precariously, by a privileged clique; the golden allure of wealth and exclusivity; a terrible and deadly secret. Give me A scrappy outsider accepted, precariously, by a privileged clique; the golden allure of wealth and exclusivity; a terrible and deadly secret. Give me variations on this theme from now until death and I will be perfectly happy. The Party is like The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Secret History and Brideshead Revisited got together and had a beautiful, twisted child. Our narrator, Martin Gilmour, is a bitchy sociopathic narcissist – so naturally, I adored him.
At boarding school, Martin is an outcast. His background doesn't match up to the other boys', and he struggles to understand boundaries and codes of behaviour, which stops him from making his mark by way of charm or humour. Everything changes when he impresses golden boy Ben Fitzmaurice and the two quickly become best friends, so inseparable that Martin spends summers with Ben's family and, eventually, they head to the same Cambridge college together. 25 years later, Ben, now outrageously rich, is hosting a party. The guestlist is star-studded; there are even rumours the Prime Minister will attend. Martin's invited, but he's chagrined that he and his wife, Lucy, have had to make do with a Premier Inn hotel room rather than being asked to stay at the Fitzmaurices' sprawling manor. After all, he and Ben are like brothers. At least, that's how he sees it.
Opening with a scene in which Martin is questioned by the police, The Party bounces between Martin's version of the history of his friendship with Ben, pages from Lucy's notebook, and, of course, the party itself. Along the way, questions are slowly answered – often in ways you wouldn't expect – and new ones are thrown up. What is the secret that has bound obsessed Martin and reluctant Ben together as 'best friends' for a quarter of a century? What lurks behind the facade of Martin and Lucy's marriage? And what happens to lead Martin to that police interview room?
I love stories like this and I love protagonists like Martin, but I've been burned by bad pastiches many times, so it's exhilarating to find a novel in which plot and character are pulled off with such breathtaking skill. It's much harder than it looks to write this kind of narrator successfully: get it wrong and you're left with nothing but shallow nastiness. Here, as calculating and cruel as he may sometimes be, the reader is always on Martin's side. (Well, this reader was, anyway.) There's also Lucy. The unexpected nuance written into her chapters is its own kind of masterstroke. The narrative is so powerful that she could easily be sidelined – the dowdy woman who has to take a back seat to her husband's fixation with Ben, the butt of their friends' jokes, a person with no interior life of her own. Not so here. Her development took me by surprise, and after finishing the book, I find the thing I'm still thinking about the most is the complicated and really quite beautiful relationship between Martin and Lucy.
I loved every page of The Party and I never wanted it to end. It is meticulously structured – tiny clues meted out so you're utterly gripped while the plot always stays a couple of strides ahead of you – and Martin and Lucy are both brilliantly realised characters. Read it on the beach, read it on a rainy day, read it on your way to work, whatever – just read it.
I received an advance review copy of The Party from the publisher through NetGalley.
If you've ever wondered what The Secret History would have been like if the plot revolved around Shakespeare rather than Classics, wonder no longeIf you've ever wondered what The Secret History would have been like if the plot revolved around Shakespeare rather than Classics, wonder no longer. Written by a former actor and scholar of Shakespeare, it's set at a conservatory for the performing arts in an otherwise nondescript Illinois town, where the lives of the central characters, seven fourth-year drama students, centre on 'Bardolatry'. Their semesters are organised around auditions, rehearsals and performances of Shakespeare plays, and Shakespeare plays only. They often converse using Shakespearean language and quote slabs of verse at the drop of a hat. Inevitably, they find all that resentment, lust, tragedy and power play bleeding into their real lives, too.
When we meet our narrator, Oliver, he is about to be released on parole after ten years in prison. The officer who arrested him is on the verge of retiring. The two cut a deal: Oliver will tell the story of 'what really happened ten years ago', on the condition that it will all be off the record. We then flash back (of course) to the autumn of 1997 (of course). We meet our players: the imposing Richard; his beautiful girlfriend, Meredith; louche, wisecracking Alexander; likeable James, the best actor of the lot; Wren, an ethereal waif and Richard's cousin; and the enigmatic Filippa. Oliver is an outsider (of course), though in this case, it isn't that he's from a relatively uncultured middle-class background (well, he is, but he's not necessarily unique in that), rather that he believes himself to have no natural aptitude for any specific Shakespearean archetype (unlike his peers). Given how the story begins, it's no spoiler to say one of the group ends up dead in mysterious circumstances (of course). There are ill-advised romantic entanglements, debauched parties, reams of secrets (of course x 3) and many scenes in which the lines between life and art are irretrievably blurred.
I lapped up the setting and the incidental details (the students live in a building called 'the Castle'! It has a library with a log fire! They perform Macbeth on the beach at Halloween!) which made If We Were Villains overflow with the same cosy, nostalgic glow of comfort that, say, the Harry Potter books provide. Though I did think the characters were interesting from the get-go, I found them a bit harder to get to grips with. It took me a good two-thirds of the novel to feel I had some sense of Oliver as a person rather than a blank cipher. There is literally zero chemistry between Oliver and Meredith, and Meredith in general is an unevenly balanced, unlikely character; she proves it isn't just male authors who struggle to write nuance into the ~sexy girl~ stereotype. My rating might actually have been lower if the chemistry between Oliver and [redacted] – which is palpable from their very first minor interaction – hadn't turned out to be part of the plot.
This is pretty much just echoing what Karen said in her review, but I'll say it anyway: if you're a veteran of stories of this type, If We Were Villains offers nothing earth-shattering, but it is likely to captivate you. It's not without its flaws, it's not going to change your life, but it's stuffed with beguiling detail and is a bloody good mystery. I enjoyed it very much.
Bradstreet Gate is about three Harvard students, Georgia, Charlie and Alice; a professor, Rufus Storrow; and a murdered girl, Julie Patel. It opens teBradstreet Gate is about three Harvard students, Georgia, Charlie and Alice; a professor, Rufus Storrow; and a murdered girl, Julie Patel. It opens ten years after Julie's death, with a journalist doorstepping Georgia and telling her there have been new developments in the (still unsolved) case. We then flash back to the beginning of all this, to the immediate aftermath of the murder, and chapters devoted to each character explore what led them to Harvard. About half the book dwells on what happened there, and the rest of it follows the three main characters through the next ten years, tracing the various ways their relationships with each other and their involvement with Storrow have affected the trajectories of their lives.
Bradstreet Gate reminded me very much of Rebecca Scherm's Unbecoming, another debut from this year, because of the cold, clinical way both books render their characters. Looking back on my review of Unbecoming, I can see many similarities in my reactions to the two - I found them both to have an empty, depressing feel, yet felt I needed to see the stories through to the end, and read them relatively quickly despite neither seeming, on the surface, especially compelling. While I found Bradstreet Gate better-crafted than Unbecoming - the characterisation is fairly consistent, at least - I felt both shared an elegant style that, while admirable in a way, would be much improved by the addition of some emotional messiness and some actual humanity to the characters. (I feel admirable is very much the right word for it; it's like something in a glass case; you might look at it and appreciate it, but it is held at a distance from you and lacks movement, excitement.) (view spoiler)[Even Alice's anorexia and associated mental health problems are related in such a detached manner that it's difficult to feel much for her, though she is certainly the most sympathetic of the three protagonists. (hide spoiler)]
Something that frustrated me about this book was the way it kept hinting at fascinating subplots/ideas which weren't explored any further. Some of these were: the issues of potential racism brought up by Storrow's style of teaching and the way the students reacted to this (I was interested in how similar this seemed to the attitudes now seen so often online, particularly over the past couple of years, and curious to know whether this was an accurate representation of the way things were going in a university like Harvard in the 1990s - is the Tumblr culture that constantly rips into the potential 'problematic' actually way behind the curve? Or is the author writing very up-to-date attitudes into scenes set 20 years ago?); the hints of sexual tension between Georgia and Alice; the substance of Georgia's affair with Storrow, which I never fully understood; (view spoiler)[the suggestion that both Georgia and Storrow might have been sexually abused, or at least exploited, in childhood, by members of their families; the question of whether Storrow's wife and children really existed; the murder itself, who killed Julie and why (hide spoiler)]. I constantly felt like the most interesting things were happening in some parallel story. (Meanwhile, some of the actual subplots - Charlie's internet security business, for example - made me want to fall asleep.)
This is on the Secret-History-esque shelf because it involves students at an elite university (one of whom is an 'outsider', from a relatively poor background), a charismatic professor, and a murder. In terms of style, however, it couldn't be more different from TSH, and from that starting point, the story has a broader scope. It isn't a coming-of-age/university story - instead, it strives for the feel of a saga, and in doing so it loses all the advantages of using a prestigious university as a (partial) setting in the first place. Not once did I get any sense of the atmosphere of Harvard. This style - I don't know what I would call it - sophisticated, emotionless - might be technically good, and some might find it brilliant, but it's a turn-off for me. This may well be a very accomplished debut; I just couldn't forge the sort of connection with the story that would be necessary to lift it above three stars. ...more
If 2015, so far, has been the year I've started being more selective about psychological thrillers (post-Girl on the Train disappointment) and disIf 2015, so far, has been the year I've started being more selective about psychological thrillers (post-Girl on the Train disappointment) and discovered that I seem to like all the films everyone hates and feel ambivalent towards all the films everyone loves, it might also become the year I finally abandon my persisting affection for any story that resembles, or is compared to, my favourite book, The Secret History. The latest disappointment in what's becoming a very long and uneven line of such stories: Lili Anolik's first novel, a 'stunning debut about murder and glamour set in the ambiguous and claustrophobic world of an exclusive New England prep school'.
The prologue of Dark Rooms opens with an arresting line: 'The first time I saw my sister after she died was at the Fourth of July party.' Neatly, the first chapter then begins 'The last time I saw my sister before she died...' The narrator is Grace, and the late sister is Nica, a couple of years younger but significantly more glamorous, self-assured and (outwardly) mature. Nica is a student at Chandler Academy, a prep school where the sisters' parents both work; Grace is a freshman at university. As we know from the first line, Nica ends up dead, and though her murder appears to be an open-and-shut case - another student hangs himself soon afterwards, leaving a confessional suicide note - Grace is haunted, unable to let it go, and becomes determined to reinvestigate the case and find Nica's real killer by herself. She drops out of college and gets a barely-existent job at Chandler, and the plot of the novel is shaped by Grace's resulting attempts to dig up secrets about her sister, her family, and their friends.
This is something of a crossover novel, perhaps a 'new adult' one. Grace and Nica are teenagers, though they don't really read like they are. They sound and act like world-weary adults, as teen characters in these books so often, and so jarringly, do. This is particularly the case when Grace begins working at Chandler; I couldn't help but feel that the story would have been more effective if Grace was maybe five years older and her investigation took place a while after Nica's death, necessitating the uncovering of secrets that were truly buried. The narrative is punctuated by episodes of numbness, ghostly sightings of Nica, and Grace's unconvincing period of drug addiction. The most interesting parts are less to do with the investigation than the background of the story, with the sisters' mother - an intense photographer for whom Nica is an increasingly reluctant subject - standing out as a particularly intriguing example. Another issue is that Grace seems to experience memories like other people experience seizures: she's forever remembering scenes from the past that arrive in 'wave after scalding wave', or else they're 'looming above my head like a tidal wave, threatening to crash down on my life'. It's an inelegant way of working flashbacks into the story when they could simply have been split into separate chapters or demarcated paragraphs.
Still, I might have regarded Dark Rooms more highly if - and I am coming to regard this as a sad inevitability in certain types of books - it hadn't been marred by an unnecessary rape scene and subsequent related subplot. (view spoiler)[At a party, extremely drunk and high on prescription drugs, Grace falls/jumps out of a window. She is knocked unconscious and badly injured (she's permanently scarred afterwards). Remembering nothing of the night, she later finds out she is pregnant, and it's clear she must have been raped as she believes herself to be a virgin until finding out about the pregnancy. When Damon is revealed as her rapist, he gives a contradictory account of the night in which he claims that she embraced him and reached up to kiss him, then says she was unconscious when they 'had sex'. Despite that, she almost immediately accepts the blame and concludes that she was possessed by her sister's ghost at the time (!) and Nica was essentially the one who not only consented, but actually 'seduced' Damon. She then ends up in what's painted as a loving relationship with him. (hide spoiler)] The messages sent out by the way the whole episode is portrayed - especially if you consider that, as it features a teenage protagonist, this may be categorised as a YA book - are deeply problematic. I cringe a bit at using that word, but if the shoe fits...
Unfortunately, this is what I've taken away from it and what I expect I will remember about it long after I have forgotten the rest of the book. But also, crucially, the rape storyline is unnecessary to the plot. If it was edited out, nothing else about the story would need to be changed, and it serves no purpose at all that I can see.
Likened in the blurb to Twin Peaks (why is this cropping up as a reference point so frequently lately?) and Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects as well as The Secret History, Dark Rooms is really more comparable to: The Lovely Bones, for its focus on a teenager's death and similarities between the two books' plot points (a mother abandoning her family after the murder of her daughter, the nature of the pivotal sex scene); Wild Things, for its portrait of teenagers behaving badly to extremes that almost defy belief; and The Year of the Gadfly, with which it shares a structure built around a teenage girl setting out to single-handedly investigate an unsolved crime (though it lacks the humour of the latter).
I originally rated this book three stars, but the more I think about it - and the fact that I have virtually nothing positive to say about it - the more I'm convinced that was way too generous, so I'm downgrading it to two. I wanted to love it, but it certainly doesn't live up to its own write-up, and for more than one reason, I wouldn't recommend it....more
(Review originally published on my blog, April 2014)
Wild Things is the debut novel from Australian journalist Brigid Delaney. Promoted as a story wit(Review originally published on my blog, April 2014)
Wild Things is the debut novel from Australian journalist Brigid Delaney. Promoted as a story with 'overtones of The Secret History meets Bret Easton Ellis', it's set almost entirely at St Anton's, an exclusive college which is part of an unnamed university. Every year, the college cricket team go away for a weekend of wild partying at a mountain retreat named Evelyn, behaving like animals, running riot through the forest and often hiring prostitutes - all facts their tutors turn a blind eye to. This year, however, the 'surprise' organised for them by ringleader Hadrien, who claims to head up an ancient, secret club called the Savage Society, is a boy; an innocent Malaysian student called Alfred who is bullied into attending the gathering and subjected to a series of horrific initiation rituals. He escapes, runs away, and is later found on the mountainside, barely alive and possibly permanently brain-damaged. So begins a chronicle of the efforts of those involved to hide, and to forget, what really happened, which will send them down a number of twisted paths, and ultimately bring about their ruin in one way or another.
How do you rate a book you both loved and loathed? I'm going with a middling rating, but that doesn't really reflect the extremes I felt during the course of reading it. Delaney's prose is gorgeous, and some of the turns of phrase are breathtaking. The combination of an English-style collegiate atmosphere with the hot, comparatively exotic landscapes of Australia is a potent one (there are balmy summer evenings by the lake and unusual animals wandering around on the college lawn). The plot is fully rounded, fully realised, and feels far more 'complete' than I would expect from a debut novel. The characterisation is similarly strong, and no matter what I may have thought of the people in this book, they did feel very real - horribly real; the strange, unconventionally terrifying Hadrien, while not a major figure in the plot, is nevertheless a particular highlight.
But... I hated the main characters. And here I must insert my usual disclaimer about how I don't think unpleasant characters necessarily make an unpleasant book. I like, even love, plenty of books with detestable protagonists. But if the main hook of the plot is 'will these people get away with this terrible crime?', I feel like there needs to be some element that makes the reader want them to get away with it. Instead, I actively wanted them to get caught and suffer, not simply because of what they actually did to Alfred, but because they were just dicks. Selfish, misogynist jock bullies with a planet-sized sense of entitlement, being protected by teachers who are just grown-up versions of themselves. The girls are largely treated as sex objects and, consequently, see themselves as nothing more than that, with physical appearance more important than any academic achievement, and plastic surgery a looming inevitability even at the age of 20. Any intellectual pretensions are just that - posturing, part of an image, never a real passion. This is supposed to be a college that is well-respected academically as well as socially, but the way Delaney presents it is simply as a playground for spoilt rich kids; not one of them ever seems to do any proper studying even as they namedrop poets and philosophers.
While The Secret History and books of its ilk make their elite academic institutions seem like places to be envied and revered, Wild Things makes St Anton's into a hellish waking nightmare. This might be the first time I've read a book of this type and felt nothing but relief that I didn't study somewhere like this. There are long scenes that are hallucinatory in their awfulness, that will make you endlessly grateful you don't have to associate with these people. The narrative is so effective in creating the atmosphere of the college - a hothouse of self-obsession, lethargy, vanity and depravity - that it almost chokes you. Delaney uses an obscure, invented band (given the ludicrous moniker of 'Lance Vaine and the Musical Hellos') as a constant recurring motif, creating the impression that this music is particular to the college, reinforcing the idea that it is a uniquely and bizarrely insular environment.
While Delaney writes beautifully, the story made me feel so incredibly depressed. As an indictment of modern 'emptiness' and materialism it is both thorough and damning. I had to break it up by reading other books so that it didn't make me feel too terrible; I've rarely been so happy to leave fictional characters behind. That said, the narrative really seems to shift in maturity and tone once the focus changes to the police investigating incidents at the college, rather than the students, and the ending is note-perfect. The last few chapters, the final chapter particularly, were so well-executed that they really saved the book from a lot of the aspects I hadn't enjoyed. Absolutely worth reading, but be prepared to stomach a lot of awful behaviour, disturbing scenes and downright hateful characters along the way....more
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