daceydacey 's review for:

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

3.0

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I am honestly not sure how I feel about this book - there were moments reading when I was really invested in the plot and other times when it felt like it was dragging (it's long book, kind of two books in one really). I really liked that - as Danforth puts it in the Acknowledgments- it's a "big, queer novel," but that sexuality isn't the primary focus of the story or included mostly as a major character trait - it's just a constant thread throughout. I would have expected based on my normal reading preferences that I would have preferred the Brookhants boarding school storyline (unfortunately isn't really about living at a boarding school so much as it's about the history of the area and how the school was created), but I was way more invested in the young Hollywood plot. I found Lillian and Alex and the gloomy 1900s at Brookhant to be a bit of a drag, even though that was where a lot of the "horror" action was taking place (I would not consider this horror, it's more gloomy and gross than scary). I thought it was clever that the premise of the fictional movie being made in the book is the same premise of Plain Bad Heroines, just like the movie the book tells the story of the actresses making a movie while also telling the story of the movie. Yep, that sounds complicated. It's not. Overall, it's about adolescence and family and has a heavy dose of magical realism. There are footnotes, which were sometimes funny and sometimes useless. There were drawings...and I really don't know why there were drawings?