“She ruptures the story. The royal court is silenced, dumbstruck by her, a girl. They look at her and they are overcome by grief and shame. That’s the power she has, Ophelia.”

The Ophelia Girls is a dual narrative that alternates between two scorching summers. Ruth & her friends spent any entire season in the icy river photographing one another as the tragic young Ophelia. By the end of that summer, real tragedy finds them. Almost a quarter of a century later Ruth returns, family in tow, to her grand country estate. Recently in remission, Ruth’s teenage daughter, Maeve is trying to figure out how to move on with her young life. The only person who seems to “get” her is her parent’s friend, Stuart who is also joining them for a summer in the country. Past and present collide in this atmospheric coming of age story that explores the desires, vulnerability and potential of young women on the brink of adulthood.

Curiosity led me to pick up this book and it was that same curiosity that drove me deeper into the story. This book is saturated in unease, melancholy and teenaged angst. The content was written to make you uncomfortable which puts you directly at odds with the exceptional atmosphere and lyrical descriptions of the setting. Overall, the story is slower in pace but I found myself eager to continue and unable to look away despite my unease with some of the subject matter.

The themes of this book will hit close to home for anyone who was once a teenage girl or is a parent to one. They deserve more than the frivolous stereotypes our society sets for them and this story is a testament to that.

Thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Jane Healey & NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

The Ophelia Girls is available for pre-order and will be released on August 10th, 2021.

“When Ophelia steps on the stage with her flowers, she stops everything.”

TW⚠️ Drowning, grooming of a minor by an adult, homophobia, cheating, discussions about the death of a parent.

"The Ophelia Girls" is a richly written, beautiful book of unlikable people moving in a slow trajectory towards a melodramatic yet drearily predictable train wreck between mistakes of the past and failures to communicate. The writing is gorgeous. Jane Healey has an eye both for detail and phrasing that make this book a work of art, sensual with a dreamlike quality, yet never becoming a work written for words and not for story. The oscillation of timeline between the 1973 summer of Ruth and the 1997 summer of her daughter Maeve is an effective literary device.

I never felt truly connected with any of the characters, for multiple reasons. Each of them has an underlying cruelty, sometimes to punish themselves and those near to them, sometimes a predatory rapaciousness for what they didn't have when they were younger. They all act as though they are trapped by the past, and unable to break free of that past. They are also, across the board, unable to communicate with each other, seemingly preferring festering resentment to resolution.

Thanks to NetGalley for kindly providing the ARC.

𝑰𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒎𝒚 𝒃𝒐𝒅𝒚 𝒇𝒊𝒓𝒔𝒕 𝒇𝒆𝒍𝒕 𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒆, 𝒎𝒚 𝒐𝒘𝒏.

I don’t normally mention the ending of a novel early in my review, but this one spoke to me. It was a moment of strength, of taking power back and yet nothing explosive nor out of the ordinary. A quiet moment loaded with meaning at an exhibition. It is the summer of 1973, teenagers Ruth, Joan, Linda, Sarah and Camille spend their free days photographing each other floating along the frigid waters of a river in the woods, striking tragic poses. Draped in ethereal dresses, embracing the cold lick of the river, there is power and beauty in the art they are creating. Flirting with death as they imitate the drowning of Ophelia, they become 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘢 𝘎𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘴. It is the one place they are free of the restrictions the world and their parents put on them. A place away from the gaze of teenage boys, who would never understand why this world they’ve created empowers them and would only lust after the erotic scene. No one is as free to be her natural self as Ruth, unlike her friends whose families summer at the surrounding houses, she is a permanent resident. A “well off” resident, raised by her strict, emotionally distant father who pressures her to be more of a lady, less of a tomboy and think about the future. Without her mother to guide her, there doesn’t seem to be much warmth nor understanding in her home, not a lick of loving attention from her father since she turned nine. In the river, she can escape the person he wishes she could be, and instead seek solace in the unique sisterhood they’ve created. It is also the only place her body comes alive, and belongs to her. It is in the arms of the river where they find glorious abandon. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘢 𝘎𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘴 are blooming, friendships forming tight as knots but the world and it’s tragedies isn’t as far away as the girls believe. Soon, they won’t have to feign tragic airs.

Stuart lives with his dad, the groundskeeper working for Ruth’s father, when he isn’t back in London with his mother. Straight away he is enamored of Ruth. Her father is grooming him for a career in law, naturally she is jealous of their time together, longing for Stuart’s undivided attention. Lacking the courage to confide to her father that she wishes to study art, there is comfort in Stuart’s friendship, always admiring and supporting her dreams. She doesn’t love him though, not like that. He is present that tragic summer that begins with the first photograph, taken by Ruth. There are secrets and confusions Ruth herself doesn’t understand, a death that follows her twenty-four years into the future, now married to Alex, the friend she and Stuart made at university. Their lives took separate paths, Stuart becoming a celebrated war photographer and Ruth and Alex married with three children- their six-year-old twins Michael and Iza and their seventeen-year-old daughter, Maeve. They are spending the summer back at Ruth’s home, after Maeve’s grandfather’s death, a place with twenty-seven rooms in the countryside which will be good for her. Maeve knows more about the shadow of death than most seventeen-year-old girls, having emerged from cancer. She has been schooled on the fragility of life and the struggle to see another day more than even most adults have faced. She may be in remission, but the fears, habits of illness seem to follow her with each waking day. Darkness isn’t so easy to shake off, how do you learn to live again and trust that the next day is waiting when you lay your head down and sleep? She knows far too much about how easily it all can end, how tenuous the link between life and death truly is. How can she fathom her own future, when it wasn’t promised before? What if she comes out of remission? What if she can’t build back her strength? Still so much a child, robbed of the freedom healthy children are afforded, and yet on the cusp of womanhood, she longs for something, what she can’t name nor explain. She is back at the place her mother had a whole other life, and with it a friend named Stuart who is about to turn their world upside down. He is just the eye she needs as a witness to being alive, someone who she can become someone else with, not just a former sick girl nor an average teenager but someone coming into herself, rooted in a mind and body desperate to bloom. A solid, beautiful thing. She also is beginning to push away from her parents, as the young do, as a means to discover who they are as an individual. Not quite a child, not yet an adult, but nestled in that space between.

That long ago summer, Camille once asked “How long do you think it would take for someone to come looking for us if we stayed here forever?”, the truth being that a part of Ruth has remained rooted there, had never stepped out of the river. Guilty over what happened, unsure how much of the cross is hers to bear, she feels forever underwater. There is a heaviness she carries, and now that her family has watched their girl suffer and heal, a miracle in and of itself, it’s hard to believe misfortune has left their door. Having spent every moment attentive to Maeve’s need, watchful over her health, terrified of losing her, she has a hard time letting go and believing they are done with the worst. She knows that you can’t stop the hand of fate, that you can’t outwit death. Her husband Alex’s reminder about their daughter, that “she’s fine” echoing in her head isn’t enough to comfort her. Now returned to her family home, the past is back and Stuart with it, his presence a reminder of who she once was and making her question the woman she tries her hardest, at present, to be. How has she become such a liar?

Something shockingly tragic happened one summer twenty-four years ago, and something transformative will happen again, but will it also have an air of tragedy? Of death? What does it mean for Maeve’s marriage, her friendship with Stuart, and more importantly, her bond with her beautiful, hungry daughter? How could she have forgotten how famished the young are and ready to fill themselves with the first experience that presents itself, often dangerous and forbidden? Some moments change entire lives, no one understands this better than her. There is a choice, to embrace your desires or deny them. Maybe Maeve isn’t the only one who has to figure out who she is and what she wants, nor is she the only one that needs to leave the shadow of death behind.

This is an intelligent novel about young girls and what they kill off in themselves for acceptance. It also about where they find power and how they decide to move forward, what they chose to build their lives upon. The most important story, I think, is between Ruth and her daughter Maeve. It is through her own daughter’s choices, the exploration of her budding sexuality, that she must face herself. Why does she feel like she is failing Maeve, as she has failed another before, dangerously so? There is also abuse of power and manipulation, vulnerability and misguided ideas. Innocence, awakenings, love, shame, guilt, confusion, and the journey into adulthood filled with secrets. Girls as victims of their desires, or the masters of them. Powerful stuff here. Yes, read it!

Publication Date: August 10th, 2021

Mariner Books

Thank you to netgalley.com for this ARC.

This story takes places in dual timeline in the same house 20 years apart. It is a story of a mother's experiences as a teenager and then her daughters experiences as a teenager in the same house during a summer. Both stories are sad and show teen angst, self-identity, and parenting struggles.

I enjoyed this book. Having read it during the summer, I felt like I was there with the characters and felt the heat affecting them and their decisions. The ending was kind of predictable but it didn't really detract from the story and seemed appropriate.

The Ophelia Girls is partially set in 1973, when Ruth and her girlfriends spend their summer days taking pictures of each other in the river with flowers adorning them, reminiscent of drowning Ophelia. It jumps to 1997, when Ruth has a 17=year-old daughter, Maeve, and two young twins. Ruth is barely holding it together, partially from the economic expense of their large, old house. She did her best during the years Maeve battled leukemia, finally beating the cancer thanks to a bone marrow transplant from her younger brother.

When Ruth and her husband Alex’s good friend from their youth, Stuart, stays with them, Maeve feels seen as an adult and not the sick child she was for so long.

This is not a fast-paced book. The writing is good, but some of the content made me wince a little. It’s fun to imagine the social mores of 1973 and 1997 and how I might have flourished or not under those circumstances, but I didn’t find this a particularly enjoyable read.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to review this novel, which RELEASES AUGUST 10, 2021.

"A mother’s secret past and her daughter’s present collide in this richly atmospheric novel from the acclaimed author of The Animals at Lockwood Manor.

In the summer of 1973, Ruth and her four friends were obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings - and a little bit obsessed with each other. Drawn to the cold depths of the river by Ruth’s house, the girls pretend to be the drowning Ophelia, with increasingly elaborate tableaus. But by the end of that fateful summer, real tragedy finds them along the banks.

Twenty-four years later, Ruth returns to the suffocating, once grand house she grew up in, the mother of young twins and seventeen-year-old Maeve. Joining the family in the country is Stuart, Ruth’s childhood friend, who is quietly insinuating himself into their lives and gives Maeve the attention she longs for. She is recently in remission, unsure of her place in the world now that she is cancer-free. Her parents just want her to be an ordinary teenage girl. But what teenage girl is ordinary?

Alternating between the two fateful summers, The Ophelia Girls is a suspense-filled exploration of mothers and daughters, illicit desire, and the perils and power of being a young woman."

I was all in at "obsessed with pre-Raphaelite paintings" because I honestly think this is a phase all girls go through!

beautiful writing and imagery, which i appreciated but it did make for slow reading, more atmospheric than storyline . I have mixed feelings about this one, alternating stories of a mother and daughter exploring their sexuality

It's difficult to write a review for this book. I liked the storyline a lot, but didn't particularly like the book. It's really hard to put into words. There wasn't enough difference between Ruth and Maeve's voices. I don't know if that was purposeful, showing similarity between mother and daughter or the immaturity of Ruth. Also there was a minor storyline that was not necessary and a little weird. ARC has some minor editing and formatting issues.

With that said, there were some quotes that I loved:
It was then, I think, that I understood baptism, and it was then that my body first felt alive, my own.

Something can be beautiful in real life but the lens transforms it into something more, gives it meaning.

It’s just the booze, the sun, the heat, the river, I told myself. It’s just a moment of madness that won’t ever happen again.

...he put his own hand on her breastbone, over her heart, and she thought it was like he was a surgeon; if he pushed his palm, he could crack open her ribs tenderly and grip her heart in his fist.

They say contempt is the sign that a marriage is really over,

How long has it been since I’ve had sex without thinking about what I look like from the outside, what someone might see if they look at me?

The story is more like a YA fiction with teenage fantasies, angst, crushes, confused sexuality which were all quite a lot for me in one book. Although the writing is good I couldn’t connect with the characters. The whole concept of Ophelia is lost on me. The pace is very slow in the beginning and only the final part is fast. It would do good to the book if it is marketed in the appropriate genre.

Really difficult to review this book, although the writing style was very good, I didnt empathise with any of the characters, disturbing storyline with Stuart having a crush on Ruth in 1973, and then in 1997 embarking on an affair with her daughter Maeve. For Ruth in 1973, her summer friendships which ended in tragedy was written about all the way through the book and then touched upon briefly at the end. I was also confused as she referred to 2 people dying but there was only 1 death?? Sadly not for me
Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review

Ruth is running from her past and is overwhelmed with life. Her 17 year old daughter, Maeve, is in remission and is learning to live again. What do they have in common? Stuart. He is the boy of Ruth's past and the man of Maeve's future. By the end of the story the past catches up with the present and both Ruth and Maeve are pushed to the brink. Secrets are revealed. Will the mother-daughter relationship survive? Will Maeve and Stuart build a life together? Will Ruth allow it?

I enjoyed this book by the end but found myself having to reread parts throughout because the transition from one character to another's train of thought was a bit confusing. I had to reread dialogue too because I wasn't always sure who was speaking.

Although I liked the book I didn't connect with Ruth or Maeve. I was not invested in their struggles and did not care about where their journey would take them.

Healey proffers readers a novel about secrets, complicated relationships, and past reckonings. The narrative switches between Ruth and her daughter Maeve. Ruth has secrets that come to light from her past, plus the present which has many challenges. Maeve has had her share of battles, but she’s trying to find her footing. Some of the scenes were creepy and edgy with blurred lines. Overall, it was a decent read, if not a bit sad due to the situations.

This book flips between two time periods - the 1970’s, with Ruth, and the 1990’s, with Ruth and her daughter, Maeve. Follow the story to see how their stories, both filled with drama, unfold. This was a good story, with an ending that wraps things up tidily.

Summer of 1973 Ruth and her four friends form a fascination with pre Raphaelite art .They became obsessed with the famed drowned Ophelia and began photographing themselves in the same way.
In 1997 Ruth returns to her childhood home with her own child who looks similar to Ophelia in complexion

Haunting, beautiful and unsettling a story that evokes summer !

Thank you to Net galley and the publisher Mantle for the opportunity to read will also review on my bookstagram;) .

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book. I really enjoyed this one and read it in one day. Look forward to much more by this author.

Ophelia Girls is a story that takes place over two time periods…



1973 when Ruth and her friends have a strange fascination with the pre-Ralphite painting Ophelia. They love capturing themselves on camera as they re-enact the famous painting out in the cold waters of a nearby lake.



1997 when Ruth returns to her childhood home with her daughter Meave, who has just recovered from cancer and resembles the woman in the painting with her pale skin and auburn hair.



Dreamy and dark and times suspenseful, Ophelia was hauntingly beautiful as it bounced back and forth between the present time with Meave and the past with Ruth. It is a coming-of-age story for both the women and the author does a great job navigating between the two summers.



The story unfolds in writing that feels almost lyrical, which made it easy to read and follow along with. The imagery was beautiful and I can not stress that enough, it had a dreamy effect as if you were watching the story unfold through a gauze curtain. There was also sadness in this story, and it was so well written it seemed to hang on to the pages tightly as you read through it.



Ophelia was my first book by Jane Healey and her second publication. I can see why people are drawn to her writing, the descriptions themselves will draw you in. Ophelia was a complex story, yet it was beautiful and unsettling. It's a story full of beautiful prose and dreamy imagery that was topped off with some really interesting family dynamics.

I have been wondering lately on the tendency of teenage girls to interrogate the meanings of death. Slumber parties dipped in explorations of the supernatural by way of daring such superstitions as Bloody Mary in bathroom mirrors. Paper folded into predictions for the future. Emulations of media's greatest tragic heroines in games of make believe that teeter on the edge of reality. All of these are fairly commonplace occurrences at some stage of a girl's life no matter how hard the narrative of "sugar, spice, and everything nice" gets pushed. How many do you know, for example, who did not playfully dabble in a witchcraft of their own childhood imaginations?

We play at death as children because we trust in the expanse of life, that it cannot really touch us. Unless, of course, we are faced with it early on. In both cases, the root of the game is control. We want the power to explore it on our own terms, one remove from the uncertainty of its truth. Jane Healey's upcoming novel The Ophelia Girls casts its games of death and daring in a softly threatening light, wrapping us in flower petals even as it pulls us into its current.

Told through the alternating perspectives of Ruth, a woman fighting memories of a teenage tragedy when she's forced to return to her childhood home, and her daughter Maeve, who is reckoning with the idea of a normal life after a childhood enveloped in hospital stays thanks to an intense battle with pneumonia, Ophelia Girls presents a tale of risk and desire with an intense longing at its heart. Ruth is a wife and mother battling the truth of her identity within herself in the past and present. Maeve is 17 and looking for answers to questions of her own she isn't sure how to ask - how do you have a normal life with a body that rebels so forcefully against you, and how far are you willing to go for a love you can hardly grasp at understanding?

As a queer child-product of the hospital myself, both ends of Ophelia Girls resonated with me with unexpected depth. I, too, spent many of my earlier years feeling like a weight upon my family for a condition I neither invited nor controlled. I spent time anxious at the prospect of hospital visits and testing the limits of the things I could handle in a body that demanded I should handle less than most. I felt the fear of what happens when the seemingly unending mountain of a battle that is adapting to a different body is suddenly conquered and you are thrust into the real, unsanitized world that will not bend for you in a way hospitals do. Perhaps more than that, when your body is ravaged in youth there is a sense of floundering for confidence in yourself and your body that seems to come so naturally to able-bodied counterparts, and when you are rolling in that sea of confusion you'll sometimes take any form of love that's offered to you. Even if it's unorthodox. Even if it's wrong. Because sometimes preying on the weak feels like being seen, to the victim. That's what makes it so effective. And so dangerous.

I have always loved a good tragic heroine, even as I hope for a better life for her than the one for which she is destined. It's what fascinates me most about the endless possibility of retellings; in them lies the opportunity to give voice to those who were overlooked or treated as little more than fodder for the main characters to use and toss aside. Ophelia Girls, while not actually a retelling of anything, does manage to feel as though it is offering complex echoes of tragic heroines past a modern voice. Both Ruth and Maeve make decisions that rock the foundations of their worlds, selfish and unapologetically wanting in a way that occasionally makes them less-than-likable characters. But this natural repulsion to imperfect women is where they get their power. We are pulled along with them and the air of danger they envelop themselves in, bearing witness to their choices and their tragedies alike, because we cannot look away. They are alluring in their danger and we are but helpless petals on the stream.

Ophelia Girls sets up a simple premise in its past-story of Ruth's teenage summer and the roiling tragedy at its heart. Having a photoshoot at a river for a summer art project is something I and my friends even managed to do ourselves, though the goal was not to emulate the beauty of romantic death. Ruth's battle and shame in herself while she grapples for a sense of her identity is achingly painted with such care I found myself eager to get to her chapters to uncover the mystery even as she twisted scenarios into stories that centered her with a self-centeredness that would make your head spin.

That is perhaps one of Healey's greatest strengths in the novel: to present the same situation in different points of view in such a way as to make the current speaker the center of attention. We are all the main characters of our own lives, after all, even as we are usually little more than the bit parts of others'. As readers we are clued in alternately to the fact that neither women necessarily has their story straight, and we can see the twisting of it to fit a narrative each has already constructed in their head, and yet it is all the more compelling to watch the worlds converge into a version of the truth it is almost painful to look at.

Ophelia Girls is an unmissable offering, even as it makes you uncomfortable. While not classifiable as a horror novel exactly, it does have buried within it a horrific heart that beats a compulsive pattern of longing for a life fulfilled.

I would like to thank the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

If you're following me on Instagram then you will know just how much I loved Jane Healey's debut 'The Animals at Lockwood Manor', and so I was eager to see if her second novel would match the quality of the first. You'll be glad to know that...IT DOES, IT ABSOLUTELY DOES. Just as her debut was, 'The Ophelia Girls' is hauntingly beautiful and left me in a state of absolute awe hours after I'd finished the book. With this novel, Jane Healey has cemented herself as one of my favourite authors and I cannot wait to see what she comes out with next - best believe I'll be the first in line to buy it, no matter what.

Thank you so much Netgally for granting me an ARC.

Review to come soon on my goodreads and Bookstagram page

THE OPHELIA GIRLS: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A beautifully written tale told in two timeframes (the 1970s and 1990s). It was pitch perfect. Read it, just read it.

NOTE: I was provided an ARC in exchange for an honest review.