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Plain Bad Heroines

Emily M. Danforth

this book is best read when your secret lover has led you to a strange but pretty location, and while you're soaking up their attention you can't help but hear an unsettling noise growing all around you

in a nutshell: Split into two different timelines, 1902 and present day, exploring the hauntings of a cursed girls' school in New England. 1902: Two students, obsessed with each other and the scandalous bisexual feminist memoir 'The Story of Mary MacLane,' are stung to death by yellowjackets in the school grounds' orchards. Several deaths follow and the school is labeled cursed and abandoned. In the present day, a movie is being made about the events of 1902. From a script written by a young woman who grew up near the school, it stars a former child star (who hasn't had much work since puberty) and a current It Girl (who was a non-actor plucked from obscurity by an indie filmmaker) and the three of them have a love-triangle thing going while the effort to make the film seems to be clearly haunted. The 1902 timeline delves deeper into the lives of the students and their teachers as the deaths pile up, and the present day timeline features the three young women trying to suss out what exactly happened at the school while surviving the seemingly supernatural happenings that threaten them and their film.

the 1902 vibes: "I'm trying my darnedest to keep this school in some semblance of order for the girls in my stead but I keep experiencing spooky shit and I want to continue fucking my coworker but she seems to be rather drastically losing it. Also there are wasps everywhere."

the present day vibes: "I want to fuck my coworker(s) but we're supposed to be working but also work seems to be haunted so I'm going to bitch about it on Insta. Also there are wasps everywhere."

main themes: The pains of love denied and lingering hauntings borne from it, generational effects of homophobia, curses, lesbian yearning, bugs, how filming on location is sometimes just the fucking worst

the writing: The premise of this had me sold before I even finished reading the summary. Perhaps expectations were too high. The writing itself was better in the 1902 timeline; it was spookier, had more interesting characters, and somehow seemed more believable. The present day timeline is where it veered into too-YA territory, and unfortunately just couldn't deliver on the awesome ideas it was built on. Yeah I think I had hopes for an all-time banger but this was geared towards a younger audience maybe.

Did I still have fun reading it? Hell, yeah. Do I wish very badly it was better? Well, yeah. Would I recommend it anyway? Yes to queers or people who love reading about haunted film shoots.