Alwynne's Reviews > A Lesson in Vengeance

A relatively slick but not particularly inventive slice of dark academia set in the brooding halls of an upmarket, residential prep school, the Dalloway School in the Catskills. Everything’s seen from the perspective of Felicity Morrow, a senior who’s returning after a leave of absence following the suspicious death of her girlfriend Alex. This really should have worked for me, certainly the setting and accessories fall into the category of likes: sapphic elements; an isolated, gothic boarding school founded by a descendent of a Salem witch, with a macabre past; covens; hints of hauntings; copious references to some of my favourite books from Gaudy Night to Rebecca and even The Secret Garden but somehow it never quite took off. The narrative’s often ponderous and repetitious, the drip-feed goes on for too long, and there’s a slightly formulaic feel to the whole undertaking.

The plot kicks off with Felicity becoming embroiled with new student Ellis who’s wowed the literary world with a precocious first novel, and now wants Felicity to help research her next book, a homage to Dalloway’s dark secrets and the women once murdered there who may, or may not, have been witches involved in ritual sacrifice. But a rift looms as Ellis’s scepticism about the nature of witchcraft comes into conflict with Felicity’s fascination with magic. It’s clear that Felicity’s not the most reliable of narrators, according to Victoria Lee this is further complicated by Felicity’s experiences of psychotic depression, which draws from Lee’s own history. Lee conjures aspects of dark academia’s ur-text, The Secret History, deliberately basing Ellis on Donna Tartt, at least an imagined teenage version. But I didn’t find Ellis a particularly convincing or interesting figure, although she’s more fleshed out than the accompanying cast of minor characters who seem to be rather tokenistic, box-ticking, gestures towards diversity, particularly the characters of colour who are barely acknowledged. Not that Felicity’s an especially interesting or rounded creation.

There are plenty of plot twists and set pieces intended to shock or unsettle but their impact on me was minimal, and the switch from supernatural thriller to murder mystery in the final stages came too late to make up for the extensive problems with pacing up until that point. I was also increasingly uncertain about the ethics of the portrayal of women and mental illness here; the underlying message was definitely less than positive. Nowhere near as diverting or entertaining as I’d hoped.