Review: A Lesson in Vengeance

 

Honestly I don’t even know how to explain what the plot of this book was. Basically, our main character Felicity has returned to her prep school after the death of her girlfriend. When she arrives she discovers that famous teen author Ellis Haley now lives in the same dorm as her. Ellis is working on a book about the “Galloway Five,” a group of suspected witches who died gruesome deaths at the school. Felicity gets drawn into helping Ellis with her method writing as Ellis tries to prove to Felicity that she’s not actually being haunted by her dead girlfriend, and things just get really, truly unhinged. This book was trying so hard to be dark academia that it just came across a bit self-conscious, and all the pieces didn’t quite fit together in a way that made sense. Now I have to admit that it had the misfortune of coming right after quite possibly the best book I’ve read this year, so my perspective was probably warped, but I also just generally had a really difficult time getting into the writing. It felt like it took a very long time for anything to actually happen, and then it didn’t really feel like there was a point to anything that happened? Like Felicity was mentally unstable at the beginning of the book. She met Ellis. She continued to be unstable. I don’t know, I just didn’t enjoy it that much.

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