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fuzzythealmighty's review against another edition
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
Here are just a handful of the issues in this book:
- It misrepresented itself in its synopsis. This book advertises itself as a "modern gothic" but it take place in the mid 90s which is now far from modern. It also is not as dark or atmospheric as it claims.
- There are many many inconsistencies in the book. Most of these are inconsistencies in characterization, but there are some in the plot which makes it difficult to suspend disbelief. For example,
The fact that the school new the details of Rose's father's death, which Rose and her mother tried to keep hidden, but not the fact that Rose's mother was an outspoken feminist. - The book has a very narrow conceptualization of dark academia.
- Arguably, the worst bit of this book is it's fake feminism. This book was lauded as feminist literature, again a misrepresentation, when the feminism in it is very underdeveloped. It lacks intersectionality. The mentions of sexuality and race in this book are not explored in a meaningful way. The cast, and tone and ethos and etc., of this book was exceptionally white, cis, and straight. It didn't address these issues brought up in the book enough. Rose was raised by a prominent feminist but disliked feminism. I also felt she was exceptionally judgmental of other women. Many Greco-Roman stories were used in this text and the author did not discuss actual current feminist critiques of this text. The discussion around autonomy and choice was honestly disheartening. She basically describes women having no choices as a good thing that changed history.
- Finally, there were so many issues that this book could have touched on that it didn't including: colonialism, socioeconomic status, autonomy, cultural transfer, education, and the meaning of indoctrination. I know that this book technically discussed class, but it was done in such a way that it didn't explicitly critique how wealth is hoarded and maintained by taking from other people.
Anyways, don't read this. There are better dark academia books out there.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault, Suicide, Sexual violence, Sexism, Rape, Racism, Pedophilia, Misogyny, Homophobia, Confinement, Child abuse, and Adult/minor relationship
Moderate: Abortion, Mental illness, Gaslighting, and Chronic illness
melnealgarcia's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia, Adult/minor relationship, Child abuse, Emotional abuse, Forced institutionalization, Lesbophobia, Suicide, Child death, and Sexism
Moderate: Abortion, Bullying, Fire/Fire injury, Racism, and Toxic relationship
viktoriawithakreadsbooks's review against another edition
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pedophilia, Sexual assault, Sexual content, and Racism
adelaidebijou's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
- Loveable characters? No
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying and Body shaming
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Addiction, Body shaming, Confinement, Death of parent, Forced institutionalization, Kidnapping, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Suicide, Terminal illness, and Toxic relationship
Minor: Abortion
jamieleepilk's review against another edition
challenging
dark
hopeful
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Thank-you so much to Quercus for the proof UK release 13/5/21.
Welcome to Caldonbrae Hall, an isolated school for girls where the girls "value" is placed higher than all else. This book wasn't what I was expecting. To be honest I was steering clear from reading to much about it because it felt like a book with lots of mystery. I was surprised by the time of the book set in the 1990s, for some reason I was expecting it to be a lot earlier and with the creepiness of the novel it feels like an old victorian gothic!
Everything is told from the point of view Rose, the newly recruited classics teacher who is at least half the age of the other teachers in the school. Rose is the first new teacher in quite some time. For most of the first half of the novel she is kept in the dark and as the reader you are kept from information about how the school is run and what happened Jane the old classics tutor. I personally loved Rose as an antagonist, she felt very real and reacted how some-one in her situation should react. Her relationships with the girls are varied and I loved the lighter sides of the novel with Rose teaching Nessa, Freddie and Daisy and her relationship towards those three girls.
The addition of the Greek classic plays was brilliant and was done in a way that even if you're aren't aware of these plays before hand you won't miss out. The Heroines stories being interweaved with the lives of Rose and the girls was a great element.
Parts of this book hard to read, especially towards the end. And some parts of this book did want me to scream and chuck the book across the room similar feelings I had with reading books like The Handmaid's Tale and Vox.
Overall I really enjoyed it and I did find it hard to put it down, the writing is extremely smooth so you do read pretty quickly. Some sections and interactions started to feel a bit repetitive after the half way point, if not for that it would have easily been five stars.
📖 If you liked/For Fans of 📖
Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth
Circe by Madeline Miller
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Welcome to Caldonbrae Hall, an isolated school for girls where the girls "value" is placed higher than all else. This book wasn't what I was expecting. To be honest I was steering clear from reading to much about it because it felt like a book with lots of mystery. I was surprised by the time of the book set in the 1990s, for some reason I was expecting it to be a lot earlier and with the creepiness of the novel it feels like an old victorian gothic!
Everything is told from the point of view Rose, the newly recruited classics teacher who is at least half the age of the other teachers in the school. Rose is the first new teacher in quite some time. For most of the first half of the novel she is kept in the dark and as the reader you are kept from information about how the school is run and what happened Jane the old classics tutor. I personally loved Rose as an antagonist, she felt very real and reacted how some-one in her situation should react. Her relationships with the girls are varied and I loved the lighter sides of the novel with Rose teaching Nessa, Freddie and Daisy and her relationship towards those three girls.
The addition of the Greek classic plays was brilliant and was done in a way that even if you're aren't aware of these plays before hand you won't miss out. The Heroines stories being interweaved with the lives of Rose and the girls was a great element.
Parts of this book hard to read, especially towards the end. And some parts of this book did want me to scream and chuck the book across the room similar feelings I had with reading books like The Handmaid's Tale and Vox.
Overall I really enjoyed it and I did find it hard to put it down, the writing is extremely smooth so you do read pretty quickly. Some sections and interactions started to feel a bit repetitive after the half way point, if not for that it would have easily been five stars.
📖 If you liked/For Fans of 📖
Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth
Circe by Madeline Miller
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abortion, Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Death, Emotional abuse, Forced institutionalization, Homophobia, Mental illness, Misogyny, Racism, Sexism, Suicide, Terminal illness, and Toxic relationship
Moderate: Rape, Sexism, Sexual content, and Sexual violence
ellekreads's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
4.0
In Madam, we follow Rose Christie as she starts her new job as a Classics teacher at the 150-year-old Caldonbrae Hall, an elite boarding school for girls that promises its students will emerge as the cream of the crop, ready to be a boon to society.
The traditions are arcane, the students are frighteningly self-assured, and Rose's love of sharing historical tales of powerful women are garnering the wrong kind of attention. As Rose discovers what really makes Caldonbrae tick, it becomes increasingly apparent that the only way to avoid the fates the school has planned for her, and her girls, will be to save them herself.
What I Liked:
- dark academia but not from the student's POV!
- dark academia but not YA!
- gothic horror but set in the 90s!!!!
- plenty of lore into Greek and Roman tales!
- eat the rich!!!!!!!!
What I Didn't Like:
- the pacing was off now and then - although I didn't struggle, I was definitely more bored in some places than others. The classes felt quite repetitive.
- there are a LOT of characters to keep track of
Overall this was a moody, atmospheric, easily-read gothic horror/thriller. I loved the school and its disgusting underbelly, I loved the girls gaining their baby feminist perspectives. Weird, dark, and unsettling throughout - it kept my attention throughout and I'd definitely recommend it.
Big thanks to the author, NetGalley, and Quercus Books for the ARC. This one's available to buy now!
The traditions are arcane, the students are frighteningly self-assured, and Rose's love of sharing historical tales of powerful women are garnering the wrong kind of attention. As Rose discovers what really makes Caldonbrae tick, it becomes increasingly apparent that the only way to avoid the fates the school has planned for her, and her girls, will be to save them herself.
What I Liked:
- dark academia but not from the student's POV!
- dark academia but not YA!
- gothic horror but set in the 90s!!!!
- plenty of lore into Greek and Roman tales!
- eat the rich!!!!!!!!
What I Didn't Like:
- the pacing was off now and then - although I didn't struggle, I was definitely more bored in some places than others. The classes felt quite repetitive.
- there are a LOT of characters to keep track of
Overall this was a moody, atmospheric, easily-read gothic horror/thriller. I loved the school and its disgusting underbelly, I loved the girls gaining their baby feminist perspectives. Weird, dark, and unsettling throughout - it kept my attention throughout and I'd definitely recommend it.
Big thanks to the author, NetGalley, and Quercus Books for the ARC. This one's available to buy now!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Rape, Racism, and Suicide
Minor: Abortion
unfiltered_fiction's review against another edition
dark
slow-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
I received a free eARC of this book via Netgalley in return for an honest review.
I really struggled to get through this book. There were definitely elements with strong potential within it, but I don't feel that those elements were ever realised. Please note that this is a book which comes with heavy content warnings; I highly advise checking content warnings before you pick this book up if you are a sensitive reader.
My greatest issue with Madam is that it felt centred around some highly tokenistic and hypocritical versions of feminism and anti-racism. In the attempt to liberate its women and girls, this book often falls short with a less visible, more subversive form of oppression. For a story that tries to tackle a hyperbolised form of institutionalised sexism, I was disappointed by how regressive and oversimplified some of the content was. For example, the main character - who is supposedly meant to save the girls of Caldonbrae from their gender-based oppression - says that she wears lipstick every day to defy her feminist mother.
The intersection of racism with sexism is also inherently problematic, as for a substantial portion of the book, the main character - supposedly outraged at the exclusion of BAME students at the school - simply refers to every non-white student at Caldonbrae Hall as "the Asian girls", making no effort to directly interact with them until she is assigned a brief period of looking after them. They are present as a secondary theme rather than as characters in their own right. A scene in the second half of the book also shows a problematic and appropriative attitude towards geisha culture.
The Gothic elements of the storytelling lack lustre. The prose is not particularly atmospheric - though sections of the book are strong; it feels that the author hits her stride particularly well between 50% and 80% of the digital version - and it is very obvious where each plot device is leading. The structure of the story is very obviously formulaic, and it relies heavily on Gothic tropes which are mediocre in their execution - stormy weather, disruption of private spaces and personal property, cleansing through fire, wrongful imprisonment. The sense of threat to Rose, the main character, does not feel more the vaguely present until very late in the book, and it makes absolutely no sense as to why she doesn't at least attempt to leave the school earlier.
I took real umbrage to the ending. It felt incredibly lazy and very predictable to resolve the problem of the school with a mass fire, begun during a ball for the upper sixth girls, their future husbands, and other adults involved in their grooming. The most authentic element of this key plot point was that the girls who set the fire referred to Dido, Queen of Carthage, and her suicide atop a mock funerary pyre. This event also has major plot holes, as it is inferred that every one of the younger girls got out safely, whilst every single one of the adults involved in their abuse died - yet only a few pages before the fire begins, the main character sees one of the upper sixth girls slipping into the grounds with an older man, so the reader knows that not every single guest is in the hall where our narrator insists the adults were trapped.
I enjoyed the Classical inferences, but felt that they could have been much better embedded in the story itself, rather than presenting each portrait of a Classical woman as an "interlude". The conversations that Rose, the main character, has with her three favourites - Freddie, Nessa, and Daisy - were by far the best element of the book. I really loved the characters of Freddie, Nessa, and Daisy, and felt that this story would have been better told through their eyes. Most other characters felt quite fragmentary and two dimensional. These three girls, however, were handled well, with a good blend of sympathy and honesty towards their characters.
I have to admit that I'm disappointed that this is one of Quercus' hero/flagship publications for 2021. It feels significantly behind the times, and erroneously lacking in nuance, especially considering the very difficult central theme of child grooming and abuse. I may have been slightly more receptive to the book if it hadn't been lauded so much.
I really struggled to get through this book. There were definitely elements with strong potential within it, but I don't feel that those elements were ever realised. Please note that this is a book which comes with heavy content warnings; I highly advise checking content warnings before you pick this book up if you are a sensitive reader.
My greatest issue with Madam is that it felt centred around some highly tokenistic and hypocritical versions of feminism and anti-racism. In the attempt to liberate its women and girls, this book often falls short with a less visible, more subversive form of oppression. For a story that tries to tackle a hyperbolised form of institutionalised sexism, I was disappointed by how regressive and oversimplified some of the content was. For example, the main character - who is supposedly meant to save the girls of Caldonbrae from their gender-based oppression - says that she wears lipstick every day to defy her feminist mother.
The intersection of racism with sexism is also inherently problematic, as for a substantial portion of the book, the main character - supposedly outraged at the exclusion of BAME students at the school - simply refers to every non-white student at Caldonbrae Hall as "the Asian girls", making no effort to directly interact with them until she is assigned a brief period of looking after them. They are present as a secondary theme rather than as characters in their own right. A scene in the second half of the book also shows a problematic and appropriative attitude towards geisha culture.
The Gothic elements of the storytelling lack lustre. The prose is not particularly atmospheric - though sections of the book are strong; it feels that the author hits her stride particularly well between 50% and 80% of the digital version - and it is very obvious where each plot device is leading. The structure of the story is very obviously formulaic, and it relies heavily on Gothic tropes which are mediocre in their execution -
I took real umbrage to the ending.
I enjoyed the Classical inferences, but felt that they could have been much better embedded in the story itself, rather than presenting each portrait of a Classical woman as an "interlude". The conversations that Rose, the main character, has with her three favourites - Freddie, Nessa, and Daisy - were by far the best element of the book. I really loved the characters of Freddie, Nessa, and Daisy, and felt that this story would have been better told through their eyes. Most other characters felt quite fragmentary and two dimensional. These three girls, however, were handled well, with a good blend of sympathy and honesty towards their characters.
I have to admit that I'm disappointed that this is one of Quercus' hero/flagship publications for 2021. It feels significantly behind the times, and erroneously lacking in nuance, especially considering the very difficult central theme of child grooming and abuse. I may have been slightly more receptive to the book if it hadn't been lauded so much.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Adult/minor relationship, Sexual content, Xenophobia, Racism, Torture, Suicide, Alcoholism, Biphobia, Body shaming, Bullying, Child death, Chronic illness, Confinement, Death, Fatphobia, Forced institutionalization, Homophobia, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Misogyny, Pedophilia, and Physical abuse
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