This book was beautifully written and so smart. The story alternates from past to present time. In the past, Josephine attended a boarding school in England during her teenage years. The school was St. John The Divine and the girls called themselves, "Divines." It is a boarding school for the privileged that many of the girls Mothers and Grandmothers also attended. The girls all go by "boys" names. So Josephine was always known as "Jo." There is conflict with the outside class known as the "townies." Also many teenage issues in this book from sexuality, bullying, and weight-issues. In the present day Jo is now married and has a child. She is struggling with things that happened while she was in school. She later attends a reunion at the school and comes face-to-face with some classmates. There is a bit of a mystery to this story. The ending was not what I would have expected!

I love these types of stories but this one just didn’t draw me in. The ending also just felt Anticlimactic even though it was leading up to something that could’ve been so interesting.

I was really exciting about this (boarding schools and class divides and messy girls! also that cover!) but sadly I had to DNF it. Something about the dual timelines, which I usually love, didn't work for me - maybe the pacing was off. Some media suffers from this issue of building up tension well initially but failing to sustain it - that might have been the case here. Maybe it gets better at the end but I just couldn't stay with it. I didn't find myself invested in the characters. The writing has promise though; I hope this works for other folks and I would check out the author's work in the future.

I cannot honestly say that I enjoyed reading this book. The characters were not likeable. Yet, I couldn't stop reading. The book is like a cross between the movies Heathers and Thirteen. Movies and books about awful people doing awful things to each other while barely surviving the ins and outs of growing up are intoxicating, IMHO. 

Jo. AKA Josephine AKA Sephine was terribly damaged from her time and experiences at St. John the Divine. Throughout the books she slowly unravels until she makes the decision to face her past.

This didn't feel like it paid off in the end. Unreliable narrators can be really hit or miss, but this didn't feel worth it.

I really enjoy dark academia coming-of-age novels, so this was right up my alley. The characters and the writing are both strong and believable, even though the characters are immensely unlikeable...but that's sort of the point. It's painful to read at times and will leave you thinking about it for days after you finish it.

I've been a fan of thrillers for a long time, and I've recently realized how much I love dark academia, so I expected The Divines to tick all the boxes for me, but unfortunately, I was left feeling unsatisfied and vaguely irritated by the end. The book started out strong, and I was quickly pulled into the world of the Divines. Eaton does a masterful job of building this world and populating it with realistic characters who will remind you of someone you knew as a teenager, or still know. Several heavy topics come up throughout the course of the book, and are delivered with a very matter of fact tone - these things are just to be expected. While that is incredibly frustrating, it does contribute to the overall realness of the story, and that is absolutely to be admired.

Where it falls short for me is in the lack of character development - even as Sephine learns certain truths, she remains the same. It would have been nice to see her adjust to the new information instead of just plowing forward in the same lane. There is also no real resolution to anything. The book just kind of ends, creating more questions than I already had by the time I reached the end.

I feel that this book would lend itself really well to book club discussions, or even academic study. But as just a thriller for readers, I'm not sure it hits the mark.

I went back and forth between *** and **** for this title, and if you ask me another day, my answer might be different.

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a tricky book to review. On its own terms, it is very successful: the writing is strong, the characters believable, the conclusion in line with the characters as we have come to know them. It is not overwritten, trusts its reader to do some of the work, and is willing to let its characters be unlikable. That's all to the positive. I would say that this read much more as a character study than a mystery, to me.

And yet, I didn't enjoy the book. It wasn't a pleasant read, I didn't have a sense of satisfaction when I finished, and I'm not sure if I would recommend it as a solo read. As a book club read, on the other hand, I can see this leading to some very interesting discussions (as long as the book club members aren't keeping any deep, dark secrets from each other--that could get ugly).

I did not find any of the characters likable, and while the protagonist does learn a lot about herself and her past over the course of the novel, she doesn't necessarily start making better choices. Which makes sense, psychologically, it's just a bit frustrating as a reader. It took me a while to become invested in Sephine's journey, and then the payoff was underwhelming. I understand why Eaton made the choices she made, and even agree with those choices. And I'm still thinking about the book hours later. But am I glad I spent this time in Sephine's head? I'm not so sure, and that's pulling my rating down to ***.

The “Divines” were all wealthy girls that attended a prestigious British boarding school that has long since closed. They were funny, intense, and brutally cruel as teenagers can be. This was such a fast read for me and triggers so many memories from those years. This book is filled with selfish, unlikable, and entitled characters. The ending offered limited resolution and left me with questions but maybe it was just a reconciling with the past and how one seemingly small action done in the heat of the moment can change your life and haunt you. This is a story that you will not forget and will leave you thinking.

Coming of age story. Painful to read if one experienced bullying and ostracism during teenage years. Teenage girls can be particularly brutal especially those who consider themselves privileged in some way. The back and forth between present day and the main character’s experiences at boarding school was interesting. Clearly her guilt and trauma from those early days has impacted her current life. I must say that none of the characters were particularly likable except maybe Joe or Sephine’s husband. The ending was a twist and a bit ambiguous. It seems that Gerry while successful and on the surface not focused at all on the abuse and bullying of her peers at school, might be carrying a grudge after all. All in, an interesting read. 3.5 stars.

I am huge fan of dark academia novels. I have hardly met a book set in a boarding school that I didn't like. This one was a bit of a miss for me. While the cruelty of the protagonist's old school chums was engrossing, I overall found the writing to be a bit too wordy. Not a hit for me.

Eaton asks if we can ever escape our past through the eyes of Josephine. Josephine or Joe, is an adult now with her own family, but keeps looking back to her past at the all girls boarding school that she attended as a child, St. John of the Divine, and the terrible way the school closed.
Being Divine meant living in your own bubble but that bubble could be cruel and lonely, especially for Jo when she reluctantly befriends a townie and her friends turn their back on her.
As Josephine dredges up memory after memory, she starts to realize that some memories should probably stay buried.
I enjoyed the mystery, the aspect of memories being different for everyone who are involved. The class divides when it comes to a private school being the major job creator for a small town was also interesting. I didn't really like any of the characters, though.

Shocking, Fast-Paced, and Highly Readable

I loved this book! It was about a boarding school and for some reason I am always gravitating to books about academia. It was also about the relationships of the girls in the school. This was such an enjoyable read and I would highly recommend it.

TYSM to NetGalley for my copy of this book.

I have to be honest -- I wanted to like this novel a lot more than I actually did. While the story itself was an interesting one, the characters and back-and-forth didn't draw me in as much as I had hoped. I found myself taking long breaks from reading the book and then forgetting everything I had read upon returning to it. This one just wasn't exactly for me!

There is something deliciously addicting about a snooty boarding school murder mystery. “The Divines” leans into that knowledge, and Ellie Eaton writes prose that is made to be devoured. It’s hard to imagine reading this any way other than in one fell swoop, a race to the end to discover how and why Gerry died that day so many years ago.

It’s to the benefit of the book to read rapidly, however, because a more methodical reader begins to notice the repetition, the drag of the middle, and the odd pacing of the present day story line. There are only so many times our narrator can remind us of how disassociated she felt with the surrounding town by recalling the school’s on-the-nose name: “We knew exactly who we were. Divine.” As the flashbacks slowly amble through a single year, building tension to the moment of Gerry’s death, the present day flies from newly-wed to pregnant to raising a toddler in the span of mere chapters. It gives the pacing a strange stuttering feeling that is only partially remedied by the breakneck reading speed the prose encourages.

At its core, this book is good fun and on a sentence level the writing is well done although perhaps not quite up to the standard of its literary comparisons Rooney and Cline. Unlike its comps, “The Divines” strays from the usual characterization of a rail thin main character who seems to have an eating disorder that is never addressed. Instead, Joe is horrified by her body—”I was hideous, a walking skeleton,” she laments—and sees beauty in her friend from town who possess the curves of the average teenage girl. Refreshing is the wrong word—the level of self-hatred is realistic for that age but that makes it no less painful to read—but it’s nice to see Eaton straying from the template.

The saving grace of this novel, however, is it’s poignant ending. It’s not so much about the why or how of Gerry’s death, but the adult revelations of Joe all those years later. Just as you think you’ve discovered the book’s message—an unsatisfying one at that—the final pages give the last few chapters new meaning. It’s an excellent example of craft that lets me forgive debut author Eaton for some of her writing deficits and gives me hope that her next novel isn’t one I want to miss.

I love books about boarding schools, like Catcher in the Rye, The Luckiest Girl and Prep, and The Divines is a great addition to this genre. Provocative storytelling with sharp writing, Ellie Eaton creates a fascinating and complex world as Sephine, the protagonist, revisits her time at St. John the Divine, a posh boarding school in England, confronting her fraught memories of the past . I really enjoyed reading this one and couldn't put it down! Thank you to NetGalley and Harper Collins for my eARC.

Perspective. How we see ourselves, how others see us, and how that changes through life.

This debut novel alternates between a grown up Josephine and her time at boarding school where she was Divine known as Joe.

Set over two timelines, one in present day LA and one in a boarding school in the 1990s, I was very excited to read another new novel within the current girls' boarding school trend.

This book had a lot of good ingredients. I liked the alternating timelines, and the secrecy and mystery laced throughout - I definitely wanted to find out where the novel would go while I was reading. The novel also touches on some interesting themes, including female identity, friendship, memory and scandal. On the whole, this made for an enjoyable reading experience.

That being said, I don't think anything in this novel was executed particularly brilliantly. The main character didn't make much of an impression on me, and there were many areas of promise that could have been made more of.

Ultimately this was a fine novel - but not particularly memorable, I expect!

It took a minute to get into this book, but ultimately I really enjoyed it. I found the writing compelling and would recommend it to fans of Derry Girls even though the book is definitely not a comedy.

NetGallery ARC incorrectly e-proof


Thank you to NetGallery and HarperCollins publishing for the advanced reader copy.


The Divines is a coming-of-age story as Sephine (called Joe in school because all the girls call each other by male knicknames) begins her life as an adult. She is a recent newlywed entering into the real world, who starts to remember and relive her time as a Divine, the title given to the members of the English all-girls school she attended for high school. The Divines are a group of privileged, hostile, elitist girls, holding little to no respect for anyone except perhaps the one who ascends to head girl in the caste system. These girls are not particularly talented, smart, ambitious, or exceptional in anyway apart from their inherited privilege and wealth. The catty dormitory life singles out the less welcome and picks on Gerry, Sephine’s roommate, and awful things proceed from there.

The tragedy/mystery that starts the book is intriguing, however I lost the sense of urgency in finding out what happened. I found it very hard to engage with the book, mainly because I was so annoyed at the characters, finding little to no interest in their lives with their appalling behavior, and not much else going on in the plot to hold my interest otherwise.

Near the end, I enjoyed the shift in perspective that Sephine has as she sees her time as a Divine through others’ memories. I liked the very ending, up until the very, very ending, and then I was kind of confused, like I missed the point. Missing the author’s intended message and purpose, I didn’t enjoy it for entertainment purposes outside of that aim, so I think this was a bust for me.