Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Pages: 320
Published: January 19th, 2021
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Publisher’s Synopsis:
“With the emotional power of Normal People and the reflective haze of The Girls, a magnetic novel that moves between present-day Los Angeles and a British boarding school in the 1990s, exploring the destructive relationships between teenage girls.
Can we ever really escape our past?
The girls of St John the Divine, an elite English boarding school, were notorious for flipping their hair, harassing teachers, chasing boys, and chain-smoking cigarettes. They were fiercely loyal, sharp-tongued, and cuttingly humorous in the way that only teenage girls can be. For Josephine, now in her thirties, the years at St John were a lifetime ago. She hasn’t spoken to another Divine in fifteen years, not since the day the school shuttered its doors in disgrace.
Yet now Josephine inexplicably finds herself returning to her old stomping grounds. The visit provokes blurry recollections of those doomed final weeks that rocked the community. Ruminating on the past, Josephine becomes obsessed with her teenage identity and the forgotten girls of her one-time orbit. With each memory that resurfaces, she circles closer to the violent secret at the heart of the school’s scandal. But the more Josephine recalls, the further her life unravels, derailing not just her marriage and career, but her entire sense of self.
Suspenseful, provocative, and compulsively readable, The Divines is a scorching examination of the power of adolescent sexuality, female identity, and the destructive class divide. Exposing the tension between the lives we lead as adults and the experiences that form us, Eaton probes us to consider how our memories as adults compel us to reexamine our pasts.”
My Review:
The story is essentially told from the bully’s point-of-view, creating an interesting mix of emotions. But in the end, I found that I didn’t much care for any of the characters. While this book was quite thought-provoking, I did question the extent of which she would actually recall that much detail about her life from fifteen years ago. It also brought to light the idea that our memories can be distorted over time and that no two people experience the same thing in the same way. The book is centered around femininity and friendships, part coming-of-age and part mid-life-crisis.
“At that age, I had no understanding of what womanhood meant, that Hera-like power I could hold. The life giving force.”
There’s a building of suspense as the protagonist shares more and dives deeper into the heart of the secrets that were her life at the school. I didn’t really enjoy the separated plot lines, as the one in present day wasn’t as interesting and I felt that the character didn’t show any growth in this timeline. I also found the ending unbelievable and unsatisfying. But I did enjoy the writing itself, and I might be interested to read from this author again. Overall, it was not a terrible read, the dark themes were engaging, but it wasn’t as captivating as I’d hoped it could be.
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