Book Review | Plain Bad Heroines

Plain Bad Heroines is a 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.

Our story begins in 1902, at The Brookhants School for Girls. 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. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it The Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

A story within a story within a story and featuring black-and-white period 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. -Goodreads

Thank you to Borough Press and Harper Collins for sending me a copy of Plain Bad Heroines to read!

I was super super excited to read this book, it was described as a spooky gothic novel packed full of female/female romance, and honestly what more could I want?! Despite this, I knew very little else about the novel, and I didn’t have any idea what I was going to be reading!! Also the covers of the novels are massively different between the US and the UK cover. The one I’ve used above is the UK version, the US one, it black and red and looks much more gothic. This one is so bright, and quirky but it really doesn’t give many clues as to the contents inside!

To give you a quick summary, this is a story within a story within a story. These three layers, of a book, a girls boarding school, and a movie about this school, are masterfully woven together by Danforth to create a rich tapestry of a novel!

My favourite element of this novel was definitely the relationships! All the main characters are queer, and every relationship was built and written so carefully, and I honestly loved all the relationships so much!

This is a gothic novel, it is filled with haunted buildings, and creepy noises. But it does have its moments of horror too, and a particularly disturbing incident with some wasps, which I did not enjoy at all!! The novel is very clever, you are never entirely sure if what you’re reading is a supernatural incident or just the imaginations of the characters running wild! I really enjoyed this ambiguity, it really added to the intrigue of the novel!

The atmosphere of tension within the novel is palpable, and it only builds up as we near the conclusion. The novel keeps you on edge, you’re never sure what’s going to happen next, and I just had to keep reading to find out!!

This novel is quite long at over 600 pages, but despite that I really think that it deserves every page! The atmosphere and tension is so well created by the author, and although this isn’t a 100 mile per hour thriller, it is well worth reading! I savoured every page of this delicious novel, and I highly recommend to do the same!

If you enjoy gothic novels like The Silent Companions or The Watchmaker of Filigree Street you should give Plain Bad Heroines a try!

Buy it from Waterstones here

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