This book is so many things at once and it does them all brilliantly. It's historical fiction and yet so aggressively modern in its language that I think it'll need (even more) explanatory notes in about ten years. It has no less than five point of view characters and they're all engaging, a feat in and of itself. The story jumps around but never lags, gives inside information and keeps you guessing, and it is so, so sapphic, in such a self-aware and unpretentious way. It's charming and delightful and spooky and thrilling and I am obsessed. The characters are each distinct and complex, jealous and selfish and hypocritical and fumbling in all the best ways. I had some minor gripes with the ending but absolutely worth the read and overall just entertaining. It's decidedly not the dark academia novel I thought I was picking up but it's the lesbian horror-comedy I needed. Thank you so much to HarperCollins for sending this to me I promise I'll never shut up about it 💕💕

PS I'm not sure anyone else cares but the writing had me very nostalgic for the voicey omniscient narrators and witty footnotes of my childhood (of The Name of This Book is Secret tradition) which like thank God

3.3 - wonderful, deep characters and character development - I wanted to love this book, but it was 200 pages too long, and it never drew me in

Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for the ARC of this book.

Where do I even begin?? This novel is so many things. It’s a large, literary novel with a huge cast of intertwined characters. It‘s a creepy, terrifying story of a curse. It’s told from the point of view of an all-knowing narrator, who can read your mind along with the characters.’ It moves so languidly that you experience intimate moments with the characters, and it feels like you’re there with them. It’ll make you never look at a yellow jacket the same way again. It’s beautifully, unapologetically queer.

Also, this book contains footnotes, which I couldn’t read synchronously with the story, due to the format of the advanced reading document. They seem to be an essential part of the reading experience though, and I’ll for sure be buying a physical copy of this so I can experience it fully.

My one complaint is that I was not expecting it to end when it did! I wanted more, and there are infinitely more stories that could have been told. But I guess that’s the mark of a good story: when you wish you were still reading it.

Now I need this to be a TV show. Or a movie. Or both. I just need more content. In the meantime, I’ll be thinking about this book, and I’ll probably visit Brookhants in a dream or two.

A compelling modern gothic tale, that unfortunately kept pulling me out of the story with a couple devices the author used: too often she addresses the readers (“dear readers”) and uses footnotes that, though they were often interesting, half the time also pulled me out of the story and old me how to interpret what I just had or was about to read. This felt like someone was taking the book out of my hands and telling me what to think rather than letting readers develop their own assumptions based on the narrative. Despite this, I was still quite engaged with the novel, which is deliciously creepy and wonderfully queer.

The plot is fun. The characters are well drawn. The writing is simple. Recommend if you're a plot-reader. [Goodreads]

Longer review on blog letzbeereal.com

This story is so many things at once! Horror, boarding schools, movie making, writers and actors, queer romance, and angry yellow jackets just for starters. I loved it! This is also a huge epic story, but I still hated when it ended. Following two timelines, this is a book about a movie about a book ...about a book. There is a lot going on, but it's all sharp and clever fun.

This week I had the absolute pleasure of reading Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth! Many thanks to Danforth, HarperCollins, and Netgalley for the e-galley.

Plain Bad Heroines is a sprawling and complex novel that interrogates the horror and violence of gay women’s restricted lives. It follows the haunting of two generations of American lesbians, one century apart. With an extensive cast of well-developed characters from both generations--1902′s reckless idealist; 2014′s magnetic celesbian; 1902′s brash social climber; 2014′s prickly misanthrope; and on and on--it manages to establish a world where gay women seize the autonomy to make decisions that matter.

In 1902, we follow Libbie Brookhants, the young, wealthy principal of the Brookhants School for Girls. At her side always is her partner, Alexandra Trills. Libbie and Alex are in the difficult position of keeping the school and their relationship together after a series of tragic and mysterious student deaths. The notion that the school might be cursed, and Libbie and Alex at the center of a haunting, becomes a concern of increasing significance as a creeping sense of wrongness encroaches on their life together.

And in 2014, we follow celesbian actor Harper Harper (you read that right) and decidedly less famous Audrey Wells as they prepare for production on the film version of The Happenings at Brookhants. Consulting on the production is Merritt Emmons, the historian and author behind the nonfiction book it’s based on. The production is a mess, with all three women asked to make uncomfortable and dangerous sacrifices for the sake of the film, and the lines between reality and nonreality begin to blur in a decidedly uncinematic way.

As Harper, Audrey and Merritt come together and clash in the contemporary story, Libbie and Alex’s relationship fractures in the past. The maybe-curse haunting Brookhants deals damage to all of their lives, none of which were in great shape in the first place. Faced with dangerous conditions that take a toll on their ability to tell reality from fiction, all five women flail for agency in differnet ways, sometimes becoming their worst selves.

With so much of the story focusing on a movie about a book which is in its own way about another book, it’s evident that Plain Bad Heroines is deeply concerned with the choices we make in storytelling, and the ways the narratives we tell affect the people who outlive them. As a text dedicated to granting humanity to the gay women at its center, it specifically focuses on the violence of narratives that are retracted, redacted, or incomplete. Fittingly, then, Danforth rather stylishly uses footnotes to expand on details throughout the text--but never are the secret lives of gay women relegated to footnote status, as they might be in other texts. Their lives (our lives) sprawl luxuriously in the heart of the pages. A distinctive (if occasionally cloying) narrator’s voice speaks to the reader directly (you may get sick of sentences that begin with the word “Readers”), feeding supplemental information that’s as likely to be real as it is to be made up. There is an implied question at the heart of the novel: what is a ghost if not an untold story?

I greatly enjoyed Plain Bad Heroines and highly recommend it for anyone interested in the same themes as me--lesbian secrets, women finding agency in tough spots, narrative erasure and violence, the horror in women’s constricted lives, flawed women making selfish choices that are the best choices they can make at the time. And there are a lot of surprises I won’t begin to touch here. But I do recommend checking it out, and I’d love to talk about it more after people have had a chance to read it. Plain Bad Heroines comes out on October 20, 2020.

This is an incredibly, staggeringly ambitious book and emily danforth pulls it off. The story is so big and sprawling, like Brookhants itself, and you can't even figure out how she did it. How on earth does a person come up with a story so rich and complex that is also very creepy and really funny?

Genius.

I first heard about Plain Bad Heroines during BookExpo's Adult Editor's Buzz session and I was really intrigued.
Queer people in love? Ghosts? Abandoned building with a haunted past? Yes, please!

Plain Bad Heroines switches between the past and present as it tells the story of an abandoned girls boarding school, closed after mysterious deaths plague the student body and over a hundred years later, when it is used as a set for a horror film. I don't want to go to into detail and give anything away so I'll only say it involves an orangerie.

It's certainly a wild ride and I had a lot of fun reading it. The best parts for me were definitely the slow building of the horror and individual POV chapters from the five main characters. I am a sucker for creepy reoccurring insect imagery so the yellow jackets were a nice addition to the horror scenes.

My only issue with the book was that it got a little confusing to me , especially in the second half. The directors plan in particular confused me. It was somewhat unclear to me why he chose to execute his plan the way he did and what pieces of the horror experiences were supernatural vs. orchestrated by him. The present story line felt a bit anti-climatic to me as well.

Overall, this book is creepy and fun. If you like stories about queer girls, history, psychological horror, ghost stories, and urban legends, you will probably enjoy this book a lot. It is technically an adult book but I think high school age readers could also appreciate the story as well.

Y'ALL, THIS BOOK.

2020 has had some real highs and some real lows as far as my reads have gone, but this is definitely one of my top picks of the year. Queer horror! Stories layered on top of stories layered on top of stories!! A character who was kind of horrible but I wanted to hug / make-out with anyway!!! (I'm looking at you, Merritt.)

With one (or two?) of the timelines being in a historical queer gothic style, I know there will be comparisons to Sarah Waters. But the contemporary storyline, with it's descriptions of bugs and moss that made me squirm with discomfort, definitely felt more Carmen Maria Machado to me. This is my favorite kind of horror -- no hack/slash, but just a sense of unease that creeps in and intensifies over the course of the book. Let me tell you, I had some weird ass dreams over the few days I spent reading this.

For me, I think a tell for whether a book is great is that I can't stop thinking about it after I put it down. I went back and reread sections. I read up on Mary MacLane (it still blows my mind that she was a real woman who existed in real life and was openly bisexual and wrote a book in 1901 about wanting to marry the Devil -- WHAT???). I hunted down Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" because the narrator suggested it in the footnotes. With the illustrations and footnotes, and my constantly going back and rereading earlier sections as the story progressed, this is one of the rare books that I would have actually preferred in print format.

This book is so incredibly different that The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and thank god because I don't know if I could handle another story of homophobia right now. Plain Bad Heroines is dark, but in the exact kind of supernatural dark that I want to read right now (and not dark in "the world is horrible and your family is sending you to gay conversion therapy" way).

I think I liked the idea of this story more than the actual story. Something about it made it difficult for me to pick up and keep reading. Maybe I wasn't used to the style of writing, or maybe I was expecting something else. This was just an okay read for me and I really don't know what to say about it, since I cant quite put my finger on what I didn't like about it.

Plain Bad Heroines is turn of the century queer boarding school horror and then some. It is not just a book within a book. It is a book about a book about a book. No wait. It's about a movie about a book within a book. And did I mention someone in the book is writing a book about the movie about a book about a book? Anyway, I think you get it. It's a complicated idea that doesn't feel complicated at all when you're reading it. It feels twisty and magical. And creepy! So creepy. I made the mistake of reading it outside where flying bugs live and almost jumped out of my skin. An example of how much I liked this book: this book has a ton of (very clever) footnotes, but the arc I received was only downloadable in Adobe Digital Editions (1.3 rating in the app store if that gives you an idea of how bad it is) and the footnotes caused the app to freeze continuously. But I kept reading the book! And I read every footnote! And it was totally worth it!

The Miseducation of Cameron Post is my favorite book behind Little Women, so I was so excited I received a copy of Plain Bad Heroines. The subject matter is right up my alley.

Unfortunately, I didn't love it. The story was good, but ultimately it was too long, which made me lose interest to the point that I would have put it down if it was any other author. The Miseducation of Cameron Post was also very long, but I felt like it had to be to tell a complete story. It wasn't so with PBH.

However, because it's Emily M. Danforth, I'm giving this book another try when it comes out and I can get a hard copy. I'm not a huge fan of ebooks (which is how I received my copy) so I think that was part of it.

Really enjoyed the suspense and characters. This is one of my favorite teen authors and I look forward to recommending this title wide and far!