If you want to see my review on Goodreads, click here. ♡
Important to know: I listened to the book on Audible and the narrator (Sophie Amoss) made it so beautiful to listen to so first, a big thank you to her.
** spoiler alert **
This one is probably one of the weirdest book I have ever read in my life (and I have read quite a bunch of weird books) and as of right now, I am still not sure 3 stars is the right rating. To be honest, I do not even know if I liked it or not but as I think I rather did, 3/5 sounds great.
This is the story of Samantha who – typically Dark Academia – studies at an elite grad school and has a love/hate relationship with a group of girls in her class. I am not sure I love Samantha: she is technically « the poor sad girl » but I also feel like she thinks she is better than the other girls. Of course the others are quite weird and described as very superficial but as Samantha is the narrator, I am not sure I believe her. She gives nicknames like « Cupcake » or « Creepy Doll » to the girls so we can feel she just can’t stand them.
Mental health and unreliable narrator
There are so many weird things happening in the book that I am not sure I have understood what I read but listening to reviews on YouTube, I think I have at least understood the same thing as other booktubers/bloggers.
Maybe the things described do not really happen but trigger warning here: there are vivid descriptions of murder described in a very light manner that can be very surprising and hard to stand.
The book is divided into 3 parts and the first one is rather « normal » aka not supernatural at all, but the second one is just… a thing. I have no proper word, it just gets « mad ».
As there is a scene in the bus in which Samantha sees a woman suffering from schizophrenia and describes her very vividly in her head, I have come to think that MAYBE she did suffer from it as well and had created that projection in the bus to tell the reader that she was unreliable. However, that is merely a hypothesis but I put it out there, « just in case ».
A cult? A creepy book
Altogether, the book is really creepy and as I said, the descriptions of murder and extremely gore and detailed in my opinion. If what the girls do the bunnies and then men is « real » in the diegesis and not Samantha’s fancy, then the book is also a denunciation of cults in schools. In any case, that is a very hard book to read, not for language but for the ubiquitous uncertainty.
The English-speaking Frenchie 