exhilarating.” - Hillary Kelly, Los Angeles Times gifted at braiding characterization, suspenseful plotting and frequent injections of flat-out terror. a supersized Slurpee that will satiate you and leave behind a sugar high. . “An exquisitely plotted, winkingly crafted romp. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled-or perhaps just grimly exploited-and soon it’s impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins.Ī story within a story within a story and featuring black-and-white period-inspired illustrations, Plain Bad Heroines is a devilishly haunting, modern masterwork of metafiction that manages to combine the ghostly sensibility of Sarah Waters with the dark imagination of Marisha Pessl and the sharp humor and incisive social commentary of Curtis Sittenfeld into one laugh-out-loud funny, spellbinding, and wonderfully luxuriant read. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer Merritt Emmons publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the “haunted and cursed” Gilded Age institution. Less than five years later, the Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever-but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary’s book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets.

They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths.

To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it the Plain Bad Heroine Society. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. Our story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls. deliciously ghoulish.” -Ron Charles, Washington Post “A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire. The award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this 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.

Plain bad heroines book review