I look up. Alex’s replacement stands in my doorway. And although it’s past three in the morning, she’s dressed as if she’s about to walk into a law school interview. She’s even wearing collar studs. With queer primary characters, an irresistible gothic atmosphere, and unrelenting creeping dread, this propulsive work of dark academia is both thrilling and thought-provoking.”– Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

I really loved the constant bringing up of mental health in the past and how women who were not understood (even without mental health struggles) were so easily deemed witches and made them pay for it with their lives. I also just loved how we get to see an unreliable narrator talk about lots of unreliable narrators! Again, the writing in this book is just so well structured and it is so impressive all the building layers. It’s Ellis Haley’s first year at Dalloway, and she’s already amassed a loyal following. A prodigy novelist at seventeen, Ellis is a so-called “method writer.” She’s eccentric and brilliant, and Felicity can’t shake the pull she feels to her. So when Ellis asks Felicity for help researching the Dalloway Five for her second book, Felicity can’t say no. Given her history with the arcane, Felicity is the perfect resource. The dean gives me her personal number, too. A liability thing, most likely: After all, what if I have a breakdown on campus? What if, beneath the tailored skirt and tennis sweater, I’m one lonely night away from stripping off my clothes and hurtling naked through the woods like some delirious maenad?

vinsentient on It’s No Fun To Be Alone: Communicating With Cryptids in The Shape of Water 2 hours ago

the characters are so... shallow? even felicity and ellis (who are the main characters...) they're both so boring, so predictable and they shouldn't be! they should be smart and complex and make unexpected moves and be one step ahead of the reader. they're not. maybe this was a metaphor (i doubt it), but ellis feels just as fake to the reader as the persona she presents at school. i don't remember where i saw this, it might have been another review, but someone said how the side characters are just names. i couldn't tell you more than one (1) fact about them, and even then i couldn't really say for sure to whom is that fact attached.

Credits

Guinevere then sneaks the unconscious poison into Arthur's drink. Arthur, after drinking the potion falls unconscious, and Gwen manages to poison him. When Gaius and a few knights come into Arthur's room, Gaius declares that the king was poisoned. Gwen says that there is only one person she knows who has access to his food: Merlin. A Lesson in Vengeance is the only book I've read for a while that fully embodies the fundamentals of what makes dark academia dark academia. There's the underlying sense of obsession around people and ideologies, for instance, so clear within ALIV (often missing in other novels called dark academia), and the subliminal homoerotic content evident within dark academia 'staple' novels (i.e. The Secret History, progenitor of it all) is brought to the forefront here and highlighted in the form of a sapphic relationship and two lesbian main characters. And do not get me started on the unreliable narrator - which though isn't a factor exclusive to dark academia, it adds another level of complexity to the fact that you're not supposed to really trust dark academia protagonists. Once the dean is gone, my mother turns to look at the room properly, her cool gaze taking in the shabby rug and the mahogany dresser with its chipped corners. I imagine she wonders what becomes of the sixty thousand she pays in tuition each year. In Lee’s (the Feverwake series) deliciously unsettling standalone thriller, 18-year-old Felicity Morrow, who is white, is reattempting her senior year at Dalloway, a small prep school in the Catskills. The year before, her obsession with the Dalloway Five—purported witches who were brutally murdered in and around Felicity’s residence hall 300 years ago—led, she suspects, to the mysterious death of her girlfriend Alex. Though she’s determined to abandon magic following the previous year’s events, she’s soon drawn into the orbit of eccentric white, gray-eyed novelist Ellis Haley, 17, a fellow Godwin House denizen who persuades Felicity to help her research the murders for Ellis’s next book. As the girls grow closer, forming a coven with their housemates, Felicity, haunted perhaps literally by both Alex and the Five’s leader, begins to realize that everything is not as it seems—not within her own mind, and not within Godwin House. Lee touches on abusive familial and romantic relationships, classism, mental health stigma, racism, and sexism while providing clever commentary on—and near-constant references to—women in the genre of horror. With queer primary characters, an irresistible gothic atmosphere, and unrelenting creeping dread, this propulsive work of dark academia is both thrilling and thought-provoking. Ages 14–up. Agent: Holly Root, Root Literary. (Aug.) Publishers Weekly

I feel like my head is full of marbles, all of them rolling over each other, bumping against the walls of my skull, too many to count. I can’t think straight…”D]eliciously unsettling...With queer primary characters, an irresistible gothic atmosphere, and unrelenting creeping dread, this propulsive work of dark academia is both thrilling and thought-provoking." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) The future had felt like a distant and abstract construct, like a life that belonged to another Felicity—a mirror image of myself existing in some parallel world, a girl who stood a chance…” While it is uncertain whether or not Ellis can be trusted, Felicity can’t help being drawn in by her and her unique charisma. The Dalloway Five and the magic of Godwin used to be her obsession, but it seems like Ellis now has her whole attention and that the feeling is reciprocated. We thus follow them as they entangle themselves in darkness and magic, and slowly lose sense of what is real or not. Sometimes I think that even within the kindest of us, there sleeps a secret monster that could be unleashed. It just takes more or less intense circumstances for the monster to awaken. That’s something Ellis talks about in A Lesson in Vengeance, as well—the question of whether a quiet, banal evil exists in all of us, and we just have to hope we never find out what it would take to bring our evil to the fore. Honestly, I love female villains—and female bad girls, unlikable girls, cruel girls, antiheroines, and so on—a lot, partly because society tends to conflate femininity either with gentility and passivity, or with an unstable, erratic pure-emotional state. But to be a proper villain, or a proper bad girl of any stripe, one must have agency. Neither Ellis nor Felicity are passive in their story. They don’t always make good or selfless decisions. They are self ish and shortsighted and obsessive and sometimes callous. All of us have the capacity to do both good and bad things, even if we believe ourselves to be perennially honest, upstanding, morally righteous social citizens.

Experiencing this story through an unreliable narrator’s perspective also brings forth commentary on the horror and speculative fiction genre and how it portrays mental illness, especially with women. This parallels how witchcraft and womanhood have been linked, and how they’ve both been utilised in misogynistic ends but also as a plot device in genre fiction. A Lesson in Vengeance follows in the genre’s footsteps but seeks to bring more factual and unprejudiced representation. Felicity suffers through psychotic depression and it opens up the door to discuss institutionalisation, medication, and the heredity of mental illness through her experience. Dark Academia (obviously!), Unresolved Sexual Tension, Catskill Mountains, Mental Health Issues, Dubiously Accurate Witchcraft, Ellis Haley Logic, Slow Burn, Bad Relationship Exemplars, Poetry Lesbians, Ill-Advised Decisions Involving Ouija Boards and Skulls, Ghosts, Let’s Pathologize Female Anger I still feel ghosts around me: the ghosts of the five Dalloway girls who defied the boxes and coffins the world tried to put them in. The ghosts of other women who attended or worked at this school, but whose legacies were forgotten instead of deified. The ghosts of every girl who came here and felt history beneath her feet. But I'm not haunted anymore. Maybe I never was.”We’re excited to reveal the cover for Victoria Lee’s A Lesson in Vengeance, a dark atmospheric thriller about a boarding school haunted by its history of witchcraft—and two girls dangerously close to digging up the past. Witchcraft is woven into the Dalloway School’s history. The school doesn’t talk about it, but the students do. And most memorable of all is the Dalloway Five–five students who all died mysteriously one after another, who some say were witches. this book is a lot of firsts for me. for one, it's my first book with a canonically nonbinary/trans character. as a trans author myself, this feels so validating, to be able to write a character like myself into a mainstream piece of fiction. it's also my first book with a big five publisher, that will be carried in bookstores. and i can't wait to share felicity and ellis' world with you all. Orlando, Christina (June 14, 2021). "The 30 Most Anticipated SFF Books for the Rest of 2021". Tor.com. I can barely stand to exist in this place anymore. Dalloway might be in my blood and bones, but as much as I was unable to stay away, Dalloway’s history—and mine—hangs over the campus like a heavy fog. I wonder if Ellis feels it. If Ellis is scared of it, or if she hopes a shadow of that evil will seep up from the ground and infect her, the way it infected Margery Lemont.