Kirkus Review: Plain Bad Heroines

 

Plain Bad Heroines

                        BY EMILY M. DANFORTH ‧ RELEASE DATE: OCT. 20, 2020

In this intricate, sweeping, and imaginative novel, a cursed New England boarding school for girls haunts multiple generations of women as they attempt to uncover the reality of the horrors that occur there.

Weaving back and forth between the early 1900’s and modern day, danforth’s unnamed narrator begins thusly: “It’s a terrible story and one way to tell it is this: two girls in love and a fog of wasps cursed the place forever after.” The place: Brookhants School for Girls in Rhode Island. The girls in love: Clara and Flo, two students found dead in each other’s arms on the school grounds in 1902. The tragic fates of the girls, and their obsession with Mary MacLane’s real memoir, I Await the Devil’s Coming, ultimately lead Brookhants, and the two headmistresses who’d dedicated their lives to the school, to ruin. A century later, this same tragedy is exhumed by “teenybopper Virginia Woolf” Merritt Emmons, a wunderkind writer responsible for bringing Clara and Flo’s story into the public eye. Her hit book serves as the basis for a bigtime Hollywood horror film starring the Harper Harper, “celesbian-megastar” & Hollywood It Girl, and Audrey Wells, “decidedly B-list” child star/daughter of a scream queen legend. Brookhants, now a dilapidated Gothic nightmare, serves as the film’s set, allowing the girls to inhabit their characters’ lives in a way that further blurs the lines between past and present. As the novel meanders through its 600+ pages, the two storylines entangle, leaving the heroines and readers uncertain as to whether the unfolding events are due to “movie magic” or the lingering effects of a terrifying curse. Juxtaposing chilling moments of supernatural terror with tongue-in-cheek commentary about the modern film industry, danforth’s sprawling adult debut boasts a cast of powerful, flawed, and unique queer women fighting for space in a male-dominated world in two starkly different time periods. Atmospheric and engrossing, readers may be intimidated by the length but will be delighted by the sly humor, detailed worldbuilding, and danforth’s creeping sense of the macabre.

A meta masterwork of Gothic horror cut with biting Hollywood satire, this wickedly clever read’s spooky fun will leave readers haunted.

Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294285-2
Page Count: 640

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins