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3.37 AVERAGE
3.37 AVERAGE
A solid dark thriller that keeps you reading. Is it a feminist statement to write about women who are just as capable of darkness and violence as men, to say that they can be driven to it by the way society seeks to impose arbitrary and archaic rules on them? Sure. Feminism can be defined in many ways. I just don't get any cathartic pleasure from reading about it.
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Megan Abbott continues her thread of mysteries exploring the Machiavellian Bad Seed within the medium rare hearts and souls of gifted teenage girls. I liked this and the subject matter was original, but I did have a few problems.
It's certainly not Abbott's premise, which she keeps fresh from book to book. This story is split between the teenage years of the two protagonists, when Kit and Diane are high school friends, and around 10 years later when they are both post-doc indentured servants vying for a spot on a high profile NIH grant project. The project is to study Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (or PMDD), a condition that may or may not factor into events.
Kit and Diane come from the same backwater California town, except Diane comes from a wealthy family and Kit lives with her single mother and occasionally hears from her deadbeat dad, often with him asking to borrow money rather than providing it. Their relationship evolves into a study buddy competition that spurs Kit to new academic heights. Buttoned-up perfectionist Diane is more of a mystery, but she definitely gets something genuine from her relationship with Kit. Something that causes her to confide a heavy secret to her one night which effectively ends the relationship.
When Kit graduates a few months later, she expects that will be the last she sees of Diane. But the world of academic research is small when you both study the same specialty and were inspired by the same mentor, a prestigious female professor who came to their high school once and spoke about women in STEM fields. So it's not that surprising to Kit when she hears Diane is joining her at the university lab where she now works with that same professor. A lab which is already abuzz with not exactly friendly competition for the coveted grant spots and Kit has been, up until now, the only female grad student. Gender politics, envy, and the slithery tentacles of all sorts of privilege abound.
It's at this point that their unresolved past comes flooding back in for both of them, and things start to go sideways for all.
I really enjoy Megan Abbot's writing, but this book reminded me of some of the problems I had with her other book, Dare Me, even though they are very different stories. At some point, things go a little too batshit, the dialogue a little too floridly insane. I'm a fan of batshit conclusions when done right (see The Final Girls, for example) but somewhere along the line this story just hoverboarded a bit too far out of reality.
Take, for example, the death of one character. I haven't been in a lab since freshman chemistry, but can you really. And it's ironic I'm the one bitching about unlikely chem lab accidents, since I was convinced every time that I used a Bunsen burner I was going to blow something up.
(Needless to say, the STEM field I work in is not the science one....)
I know this is a little unfair, but I also was a little less enamored of the story when I Googled a plot point (I won't get into specifics, and the link is spoilery, obviously) and found that whole story thread was lifted more or less verbatim from a real event, down to the culprit being motivated to confess by reading Claudius' "O, my offense is rank" speech from Hamlet.
Megan Abbott always has lots on her mind besides mystery that is interesting; here it includes the life of women in the sciences, how money and class define our choices in countless ways, and how far you'll go when the thing you've worked your whole life for is now both tantalizingly close and ready to collapse into dust within a breath. It's a lot to think about which elevated the aspects of the story that didn't always work for me. And I'm still in love with her writing no matter what, including the repeated appearances of the color red. Not just to tie back to the PMDD study, but to remind us of passion. And violence.
"Kit, you're my friend, right? You're my friend forever."
I took one of her arms hard in mine, but I didn't reply. I never replied to forevers. Life was long, and full of surprises.
At the next table, a trio of white-haired businessmen are hunched over steaks quivering on their plates. Instead of sawing, all of them seem to stroke the meat toward themselves, never switching hands, never scraping the plate, never doing anything I'd need to do to make eating happen.
Because there was Diane lurking under the dark scrim, Diane's voice in my ear, a worm wriggling. I'm taking your scholarship and I'm leaving you with this. Because whenever I paused a moment, whenever I let my imagination overtake me, Diane's confession would reappear, sitting on my chest like a succubus.
What did everyone else think?
It's certainly not Abbott's premise, which she keeps fresh from book to book. This story is split between the teenage years of the two protagonists, when Kit and Diane are high school friends, and around 10 years later when they are both post-doc indentured servants vying for a spot on a high profile NIH grant project. The project is to study Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (or PMDD), a condition that may or may not factor into events.
Kit and Diane come from the same backwater California town, except Diane comes from a wealthy family and Kit lives with her single mother and occasionally hears from her deadbeat dad, often with him asking to borrow money rather than providing it. Their relationship evolves into a study buddy competition that spurs Kit to new academic heights. Buttoned-up perfectionist Diane is more of a mystery, but she definitely gets something genuine from her relationship with Kit. Something that causes her to confide a heavy secret to her one night which effectively ends the relationship.
When Kit graduates a few months later, she expects that will be the last she sees of Diane. But the world of academic research is small when you both study the same specialty and were inspired by the same mentor, a prestigious female professor who came to their high school once and spoke about women in STEM fields. So it's not that surprising to Kit when she hears Diane is joining her at the university lab where she now works with that same professor. A lab which is already abuzz with not exactly friendly competition for the coveted grant spots and Kit has been, up until now, the only female grad student. Gender politics, envy, and the slithery tentacles of all sorts of privilege abound.
It's at this point that their unresolved past comes flooding back in for both of them, and things start to go sideways for all.
I really enjoy Megan Abbot's writing, but this book reminded me of some of the problems I had with her other book, Dare Me, even though they are very different stories. At some point, things go a little too batshit, the dialogue a little too floridly insane. I'm a fan of batshit conclusions when done right (see The Final Girls, for example) but somewhere along the line this story just hoverboarded a bit too far out of reality.
Take, for example, the death of one character. I haven't been in a lab since freshman chemistry, but can you really
Spoiler
die because your overheated beaker shatters and the flying glass shards slice your jugular vein? That is like a million to one shot, isn't it? I feel like the games at the county fair have better odds(Needless to say, the STEM field I work in is not the science one....)
I know this is a little unfair, but I also was a little less enamored of the story when I Googled a plot point (I won't get into specifics, and the link is spoilery, obviously) and found that whole story thread was lifted more or less verbatim from a real event, down to the culprit being motivated to confess by reading Claudius' "O, my offense is rank" speech from Hamlet.
Megan Abbott always has lots on her mind besides mystery that is interesting; here it includes the life of women in the sciences, how money and class define our choices in countless ways, and how far you'll go when the thing you've worked your whole life for is now both tantalizingly close and ready to collapse into dust within a breath. It's a lot to think about which elevated the aspects of the story that didn't always work for me. And I'm still in love with her writing no matter what, including the repeated appearances of the color red. Not just to tie back to the PMDD study, but to remind us of passion. And violence.
"Kit, you're my friend, right? You're my friend forever."
I took one of her arms hard in mine, but I didn't reply. I never replied to forevers. Life was long, and full of surprises.
At the next table, a trio of white-haired businessmen are hunched over steaks quivering on their plates. Instead of sawing, all of them seem to stroke the meat toward themselves, never switching hands, never scraping the plate, never doing anything I'd need to do to make eating happen.
Because there was Diane lurking under the dark scrim, Diane's voice in my ear, a worm wriggling. I'm taking your scholarship and I'm leaving you with this. Because whenever I paused a moment, whenever I let my imagination overtake me, Diane's confession would reappear, sitting on my chest like a succubus.
What did everyone else think?
Once this got cooking, it really got cooking. Abbott paints killer casts and fucking rocks the suspense. That said, the first third of this book felt stretched by acidic bubblegum descriptions when the story wasn't reaching far enough.
I felt like this book tried to hard to be dark and edgy and just ended up being empty. I couldn’t like any of the characters because they all felt cold.
This book began fairly slowly, but once it ramped up about half way through, it was a force! I'm not sure that I would call it a twist, per say, but there were little surprises sprinkled in that made the ending well worth it.
Wow. I knew how most of the story was turning out, what was going to happen before it did 90% of the time and was annoyed that it seemed so obvious, until that ending. I didn’t see the last few chapters coming, and they made the whole book worth it.
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Good summertime reading. Probably more like 3.5 stars for what it is — I enjoyed going on the ride, but five years from now I’ll pick it up in a bookstore and wonder if I read it.