I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this book but this tale of dark academia is one heck of a wild ride! At its heart, "The World Cannot Give" by Tara Isabella Burton is a cautionary tale about obsession. Laura decides to attend a boarding school because she is obsessed with an author who attended the school in the past. Once there, she becomes obsessed with fellow student and choir president Virginia, who has disturbing obsessions of her own. Laura's happiness quickly unravels as she follows Virginia down a dark path full of lies and even violence.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author creates an unnerving world and the plot is inventive and unique. I couldn't predict what would happen next. Laura's coming-of-age moment is perfectly described. I thought the writing was excellent and though the characters are young, this is definitely not a fluffy YA read. I loved the inclusivity as well. This was a book I just couldn't put down!

Many thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for the opportunity to read an advanced digital copy of this fabulous book in exchange for my honest review.

3.5/5

This is quite a generic dark academia tale filled with vapid characters and with heavy Christian faith rhetoric. However, none of this bothered me terribly, and in the end I enjoyed reading this quite a lot. Halfway through, the narrative progressed with many great, thoughtful ideas. It also had some pretty cool twists.

Thank you for this opportunity. The gist by invisiblemonster in Readerly is mine.

The World Cannot Give by Tara Isabella Burton

Published: March 8, 2022
Simon & Schuster
Pages: 317
Genre: Religious Fiction
KKECReads Rating: 5/5
I received a copy of this book for free, and I leave my review voluntarily.

Tara Isabella Burton is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Winner of the
Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for Travel Writing, she completed her doctorate in 19th-century French literature and theology at the University of Oxford and is a prodigious travel writer, short story writer, and essayist for National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist's 1843, and more. She works for Vox as their Religion Correspondent lives in New York and divides her time between the Upper East Side and Tbilisi, Georgia.

“She has been homesick, all her life, for here.”

Laura wants something to believe in; she yearns to feel like she belongs. She has found, she believes is the foundation of that within the pages of her beloved book. The book that led to the school. To her.

This was an excellent read. The character development was fantastic; the powerful themes and the idea that this could happen were terrifying.

Our main narrator is Laura, a shy, quiet young lady looking to belong. Her development from the beginning through the end is incredible.

Virginia is not likable, she says as much, but she also stands for what she believes is correct. The problem is what she considers to be right.

I loved the dynamic between light and dark throughout this novel, the constant battle between good and evil, the desire to be remembered, and wanting to be.

The ego was well represented in this novel in several ways, as was empathy, fear, loneliness, loyalty, and love.

I enjoyed the way choral music was used to present a point, but the religious tones were not garishly shoved down my throat.

I enjoyed the dynamics of having characters that were not heterosexual but also not used as sexy distractions. This was about connection, relationship, and truth.

The final chapters of this novel will slap you in the face so many times, your cheek will ache, and you won’t be able to breathe properly.

Whatever you think is going to happen, you’re mistaken. This was a deeply emotional, beautifully written novel about growing up, standing up, believing in something, and the realization that the people we place on pedestals don’t always deserve it.

This was exactly the book I needed to get lost in right now. New England boarding school is where I mentally needed to escape. It echoed so many of the feelings of existential despair I had in high school as I tried to make sense of the world. This is for the ambitious, dark academia girls who stop at nothing to become World-Historical.

The World We Cannot Give has very dark academia vibes which I absolutely loved!! It was also kind of nostalgic, it kind of reminded me of the movie The Heathers in a way. I would honestly love to see this book picked up for a movie or mini series. The setting of this novel is moody and atmospheric and the characters are complex and well written.

Laura Stearns is trying to figure out who she is. The only thing she seems to know about herself is that she is OBSESSED with the author, Sebastian Webster. She has read his book a million times and it’s a dream come true when she convinces her parents to let her go to his boarding school in Maine. Once Laura arrives, she struggles with who she wants to be at her new school. She knows she should be the nice girl, but she has her heart set on becoming world historical. When she befriends Virginia Strauss, the class bully and snob Laura begins to change in ways she could have never imagined. How far are Laura and Virginia willing to go to become world historical? This book gets DARK, but in the best way. I loved it and absolutely cannot wait to read more from this author!

#TheWorldCannotGive:

“The thing about growing up,” Isobel says, “is that you learn that sometimes, bad people are just bad people. And most people, in the end, are bad people.”

Fight Club boarding school? Those are magical words to my little ears. However, this honestly made me think of a darker Mean Girls with Virginia Strauss as Regina George and Laura as Cady, or for those that know it, The Heathers. (Hey Winona) It was the same clique kind of school and I was bored. I almost DNF but I kept on since I was on a road trip. Part 2 is where it starts to pick up into the dark and twisted plot I was waiting for. Some of you may not make it that far, so I want to preface that first!

These friendships are grade A toxic and have a major co-dependency to them. They are constantly seeking validation and it’s so relatable to a fault. The hyper obsession was a really different angle. There’s discussion with what teens go through in today’s society (queue Teenagers by MCR) and it’s an eye opening interpretation. There’s a slew of triggers, so please watch out for those going in.

I listened on audio and Sarah Beth Pfeifer had me evoking emotions I didn’t know I could. Her nonchalant and haughty tone as Virginia had me ready to pull a gal by her hair. Her kind rough, but caring voice for Isobel had me sobbing. (Yes, of course I cried)

I enjoyed the ending, even with it not being wrapped in a bow. We get some of the growth we were missing, even if it’s just acceptance of how this is how people will always be. It fell a bit flat in the beginning, but made up in the end, but still has me conflicted on how to rate this.

Thank you so much @simon for the gifted copy. The World Cannot Give is out 3/8!

In The World Cannot Give, Tara Isabella Burton returns to the emotional terrain of Social Creatures and the obsessive relationship that exists between two young women -- one of whom is in a socially dominant position. This novel is best understood as a moral coming-of-age novel which happens to be set in a twisted academic world. The narrator is sixteen-year-old Laura Stearns, who transfers to St. Dunstan's prep school in Maine from Las Vegas, Nevada simply because her favorite author, Sebastian Webster, attended school there. Laura idolizes Webster and the only novel he wrote, full of idealistic concepts that only a teenager could love, such as wanting to experience a "shipwreck of the soul," and fighting "World-Historical battles you can die in." Fortunately for Laura, Virginia Strauss -- a fellow-student and the self-appointed spiritual leader of the student body -- feels exactly the same way. Like Stephen Webster -- who died fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War -- Virginia' too worships obsession without regard to morality, placing Laura in an untenable position of idolizing a woman capable of incredible acts of cruelty. The novel is darkly beautiful in terms of writing and plot structure, but also in terms of message. Not only does it show how destructive obsession alone can be, but it also does a good job showing how complicated morality is. There are rarely black and white answers.; we can all be guilty. 5 out of 5 stars. Highly recommended.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is like…. a sapphic, dark academia A Separate Peace? You ever been a teenager and growing up is hard and nobody understands? That’s basically the summary of Laura Stearns. And then she joins a weirdly intense school church choir and meets Virginia, who is uhhhhh intense. This whole book is really kind of intense and yet ALSO I found it really hard to get into? I feel like it should be read in pieces over the course of several months, it feels like a really slow read. This feels like a four-and-a-half star read. Rounded down for NetGalley, feels like I might revisit this one in the future.

I really wanted to love this book, one of my favorite types of books are dark academia, This book just didn't do it for me. I felt like the plot dragged on and it took me multiple sittings to try and get into the story. The characters fell flat and I couldn't seem to find one to connect to.

This is a story about obsession.  Laura Stearns, a high school junior, is excited to leave behind her mundane life in Las Vegas for St. Dunstan’s Academy in Maine.  The school is best known for its alum Sebastian Webster, who wrote Laura's favorite novel when he was nineteen before dying while fighting in the Spanish Civil War.  Laura feels that Webster is the only person who has really ever understood her, and, when she arrives, she is excited to find like minded peers at St. Dunstan in the members of the school chapel choir.  The choir is led by Virgina Strauss, utterly devoted to her newfound faith, a charismatic, almost cult-like leader of the choir members, and convinced that she, like Webster, is destined for a life that is “World Historical.”

Laura quickly becomes obsessed with Virginia.  When Virginia asks her to join the choir, Laura feels like all of her dreams have come true.  But as Virginia's view of tradition, faith, and purpose are challenged by the school's new priest and her former freshman year roommate, an activist committed to challenging the status quo at the school, Virginia turns to increasingly intense means to maintain both the school's traditions against what she views as relativism and her control over the choir itself.  Laura, enthralled and maybe even in love with Virginia, is willing to follow her lead anywhere -- even as the costs of that devotion seem to mount to previously unimaginable degrees.

This was a strong book.  I am partial to prep school novels, and this was a great modern take on this genre.  The book reflected both the classic elements of such novels, including the intense pressure newcomers feel to find their place among various cliques, and more modern elements, including how the traditions of institutions such as prep schools are increasingly falling in the face of contemporary pressures. 

The author also did an excellent job of showing the effects a charismatic leader can have on those that follow them, most notably why and how their disciples will follow them in ways that, from the outside, seem shocking and even as the leader seems to become increasingly contradictory or erratic.  Finally, the author offers interesting insights into the nature of desire and the different forms it can take.

Highly recommended!

Laura Stearns is a very sensitive girl. At sixteen, everyone who knows her thinks of her as “young”, always on the verge of tears. But all Laura wants to be is World-Historical and to experience what her favorite author Sebastian Webster wrote about: a “shipwreck of the soul”. Because of her love for Webster, she decides to leave her hometown during her junior year to transfer to his alma mater, St. Dunstan’s, located in an isolated coastal town in the Northeast. Upon arrival, Laura becomes captivated with the enigmatic choir president, Virginia Strauss. What starts as an innocent case of admiration and intrigue morphs into a tense, ugly, and obsessive relationship that spirals out of control in ways that Laura could have never imagined. The World Cannot Give is a stunning debut that embodies the dynamics of the dark academia subgenre while also presenting a coming-of-age story steeped in teenage insecurity and yearning.

Oh, this book was GOOD. Like, scarily good. Scary in terms of both the story and how well-written it was. Listen: teenagers today are so scary to me lol. Burton masterfully showed this with how her teens utilized the internet in the story. These kids were just plain nasty! I’m eternally grateful that I am so far removed from high school now—I graduated 13 years ago before social media took off in the way that it has now. We had Myspace and Facebook was really taking off (I didn’t get one until freshman year of college, though), so the sheer magnitude of online presence that kids today have just wasn’t a thing. All of this to say: it was very different. Okay, back to the book! As is typical for a book set in high school, all of the kids weren’t fully formed beings; they were trying to find themselves. Sometimes “finding themselves” meant emulating the other kids that they found interesting, sometimes it meant joining a cult-like school church choir. You know, as one does. While The World Cannot Give had all of the trappings of a good dark academia novel, it was the characters that really shone for me. Laura Stearnes was so insecure but so earnest and full of yearnings that she didn’t know how to handle, and her inner tension really endeared her to me, even though I didn’t always agree with her choices. She wanted so much for her experience at school to mirror the idealized one she had in her head, and isn’t that a feeling that’s always at the core of teenage life? She was lost and quietly flawed, and I loved her! Now, Virginia Strauss, on the other hand, was a whirlwind. A budding religious zealot who was austere and exacting, this girl scared me! But she was absolutely fascinating. She seemed so sure of herself and her place in the world, but it was glaringly obvious that she was just as lost and jaded as the rest of the kids—she was just more intense about it. Seeing her exert her influence on the campus, both with teachers and fellow students, was chilling. Although Laura was the main character, Victoria ruled this book; she bled into every aspect of it, and the other characters truly revolved around her. I won’t forget her character for a long time!

Overall, I loved this book. The open-ended ending confused me a bit though. I think I know what happened, but I’m not sure. Other than that, this book was pretty much perfect, and I can see it becoming a popular entry into the dark academia subgenre.

The description for The World Cannot Give gave me all the vibes of The Secret History. It's a dark coming of age tale set in a Christian Boarding School. I enjoyed the style of writing and felt the teenagers were portrayed in a very real way. Ultimately, it just wasn't my cup of tea, but I think it might appeal to a younger reader.

Thank you to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for this ARC.

If you tell me 'dark academic setting' and 'sapphic main characters' I don't need to know much more to pick up a story. The World Cannot Give is an exploration of indoctrination, fervor, and power dynamics. We see the cult-like worship of the lauded and tragic alumni author, Sebastian Webster, and the religious zealotry from charismatic Virginia Strauss. Laura's descent into this world and Virginia's orbit is enthralling, alluring, and as dark and twisted as you'd hope.

I'm kind of don't know how to review this book. The World Cannot Give both had me infuriated at nearly every character and yet it kept me on its hook of wanting to know what happens next.

The gist is that Laura, a teen girl obsessed with an author named Sebastian Webster, heads out to start school at a boarding school where Webster also attended, (before he died at 19.) Laura is into the atmosphere and the ideas that Webster spouted, so when she meets Virginia, the head of the choir and fellow obsessee of Webster, she gets a bit (unhealthily) addicted to Virginia as well. Laura start doing all the things that Virginia does and inserts herself into Virginia's circle. But soon Virginia's status begins to topple, bit by bit, and Laura has to deal with the fall out.

You could probably call this dark academia, and it certainly reads like a gritty teen drama you'd see on CW or Netflix, which I both enjoyed and hated? Not every character in every book has to or needs to be likeable. And this book had only unlikeable characters. The decisions Laura makes to excuse Virginia are ridiculous, and the fact that no teachers intervened in half of the things that happened was also super frustrating. But hey, that means the book made me feel something, and for that, it gets props.

Recommended for you if you enjoyed the first season of Riverdale or Pretty Little Liars, you like to read books with unlikeable characters, or if you get a kick out of the idea of existentialism. Also if dark academia and extremely pretentious characters are your thing.

Thanks to Simon and Schuster and Netgalley for the e-ARC.

Unputdownable. Jennifer’s Body meets The Moth Diaries. Burton’s writing style is so interesting and enrapturing. Also who can say no to sapphic boarding school cult books???? NOT ME

As someone who has been reviewing books for a long time, I’ve developed a pretty good curatorial sense with regard to my choices. The reality is that there are just too darned many books out there – there’s no hope of me reading them all. And so, I’ve gradually found a selection system that works for me.

But there’s no such thing as a perfect system.

And so, every once in a while, I find myself with a book that almost fell through the cracks. Usually, it’s a style or genre that I don’t ordinarily indulge in. For whatever reason, the title was never on my radar until one voice – usually a fellow critic or blogger whose opinions I respected – pushed it into my attention. Many times, that book still isn’t for me.

But sometimes, I get Tara Isabella Burton’s “The World Cannot Give.”

Set in an isolated Maine prep school, this is a story about the many shapes and flavors of fervor. It is a tale about the choices we make, about how we allow ourselves to be consumed by the outside influences that serve as flames to our moths. It is about sexuality and religion and the devotion that springs from them both.

It is also – if you’ll forgive the light blasphemy – one hell of a read.

Laura Stearns is a teenaged girl living in Nevada. She’s smart, but she doesn’t really fit into the fabric of her high school experience. Her dream is to attend St. Dunstan’s Academy, a prep school in Maine that happens to have as its most famous alum a young man named Sebastian Webster, who died as a teenager, but not before leaving behind the manuscript for what would become “All Before Them,” a novel about his school experience that would go on to inspire and enrapture generations of young readers.

And her dream is coming true.

Laura finds herself on the bucolic campus, her novel-driven familiarity still accurate all these decades later. Her hope – her deepest desire – is to find the same sort of passions for herself that run so deeply through Webster’s pages.

At first, Laura struggles to find her bearings. Her roommate Bonnie is a budding social media influencer; nice enough, but the two have little in common. It is only when she encounters the willful and charismatic Virginia Strauss that she starts to believe she’s found what she seeks. Virginia is the leader of the school’s choir, ruling over it with a demanding nature and an ironclad (albeit relatively new) faith.

It's not long before Laura is swept up in the maelstrom that surrounds Virginia. She quickly offers up her devotion, just as the other choir members have, all of them mesmerized into a single-minded devotion to Virginia and her passion. Love – in many forms – is both omnipresent and ever-compicated.

But it’s a fine line between passion and fanaticism – a line that only gets blurrier as Laura’s connection to Virginia deepens. And yet, Laura has decided that Virginia shall be her guide in this ongoing quest for meaning, and so even as circumstances grow stranger and more fraught – and more dangerous – Laura remains by her side, even as the walls start to crumble.

My affinity for coming-of-age stories is well-documented, and “The World Cannot Give” is very much that. The willingness of the young to subsume themselves within the fires set by another – it’s familiar. We’ve all been there, looking up to a peer or near-peer so much as to overlook their flaws. So it is with Laura, whose search for identity leads her toward relinquishing her individuality. Adolescence is rife with those temptations, rendered thoughtfully and evocatively by Burton. And when we introduce love into the equation, well … things only grow more complicated, regardless of whether that love is sincere or weaponized.

(I’ll concede that I – a middle-aged man – am not necessarily the target audience for this book. Yet one could argue that Burton’s ability to make this tale resonate with me speaks to a universality that belies the seeming narrowness of focus. Look, I’m not one to casually wander into books about teen girls in choir/cults at old-money prep schools dealing with love (queer or otherwise) and its consequences, but here we are.)

There’s a tendency to try and describe books in the context of other books; the tagline I kept seeing for this one was “‘The Girls’ meets ‘Fight Club’” – not a terrible comparison, to be sure, and certainly one that pushed me the rest of the way toward it. But while reading, I kept thinking of a different book – Robert Cormier’s “The Chocolate War,” a book that offers its own look at the damaging potentialities at play when prep school meets cult of personality. Perhaps the similarities are only surface-level, but the synaptic connections I made were undeniable.

While there were a few reasons that I started the book, the reason that I stayed was Burton. Combining writerly skill with narrative depth isn’t something that everyone can do – there are plenty of stylists I admire who can’t tell a story, and plenty of gifted storytellers whose prose is plain – but Burton makes it all seem easy. We glide through the story, moments of intimacy and excitement treated with equal respect. It is truthful, delicate work.

I didn’t know what I was getting when I picked up “The World Cannot Give.” As it turns out, what I got was my biggest literary surprise of the year thus far.

Honestly, I just think this book was not for me, but that does not mean it is bad. It is cute!! The book takes place at a Christian Boarding School and follows a Sapphic student trying to get by. I really liked how it incorporates music! The dialogue also is relatable, the characters feel like real people. I would try another book by Burton because the topics they talked about in this book was amazing!
Thank you net gallery for this ARC!!

5 stars

Listen, I am a sucker for a dark academia story that features a group of elitist teenagers whose hypocrisy slowly fractures their group as the book hurtles towards it deadly conclusion.

That's exactly what we get in Tara Isabella Burton's The World Cannot Give, which tells the story of a fractious choral group at a New England boarding school led by a charismatic young girl obsessed with becoming World-Historical. There were so many things about this book that I gravitated towards - the idea of the choral group, the group's obsession with a classic novel written at their schools, the naïve nature of our protagonist Laura that hit a little close to home, and the often uncomfortable truths about morality being posed. Burton's writing is succinct, sparse, and absolutely pitch perfect in presenting this thorny tale of good, evil, and the shades of gray in between. I absolutely loved this book and it reminded me that I need to get some more dark academia in my life pronto.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an ARC of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review!

Absolutely stunning. The next great dark academia craze. The pure joy I felt at following these teenage women rebelling, loving, living, and dying. Virginia and Laura's relationship is purely fascinating and all the characters are technicolour in their pure vibrancy. I cannot get enough.

Oh, this book stabbed me repeatedly in the memories of my own adolescence, when I too was a young woman searching for transcendence and meaning, and ran headlong instead into immovable orthodoxy. My situation was different, however, from the teenagers’ at the heart of this book. Where I gradually fell away from tradition, repulsed by a dogma that in practice enforced injustice and misery, the young choristers of St Dunstan’s Academy instead hold more tightly to the beliefs that grant them exclusivity, under the wild-eyed leadership and control of the impossibly beautiful, austere Virginia Strauss.

It’s into this rarefied circle that sixteen year-old Laura Stearns steps, a transfer student to the very school where her idol, Spencer Webster, set his masterpiece before running away to fight and die in the Spanish Civil War. Webster’s sole novel, All Before Them, is one of those books that appeals to the young idealist searching, like its protagonist Robert Lawrence, for <i>the shipwreck of the soul</i> that will galvanize them into righteous action. The vast majority of sensible people will, of course, have little time for such nonsense. But silly, sensitive Laura finds kindred spirits in Virginia and the boys of the chapel choir, as well as beauty in their Evensong:

QUOTE
They sing it together: <i>My soul doth magnify the Lord</i>, Laura’s deep voice and Virginia’s light one. The strangeness comes over Laura once again: how two different melodies can become at once single and disparate, something that overflows, as if there is too much of itself for a single note to bear. They go on to <i>And my spirit hath rejoiced in God the savior</i>; then, Laura is no longer Laura, but only a vessel for whatever overflowing thing is passing through her, and the sound is both hers and not hers, and she is and is not part of it, and Virginia’s hair smells like candle wax, and Laura thinks, This, this is the sound Robert Lawrence heard; this is the thing that could shipwreck your soul, if you only let it[.]
END QUOTE

Soon, Virginia is molding Laura into the kind of serious person she herself strives to be, someone who forsakes sleep and food in pursuit of academic and spiritual perfection. Never mind that many of their fellow students, led by the charismatic Isobel Zhao, think them weird and snobby and stuck in the past with its outdated, autocratic traditions. The beauty of choral song and Webster’s legacy bind the choristers together as deeply as the vows of any secret society would, even in the face of their peers’ hostility.

But when the new choirmaster, Reverend Lloyd Tipton, begins to push back against Virginia’s iron grip, citing his pastoral responsibilities to the community as a whole, a spark is ignited that will quickly engulf the whole school. Students take sides as the conflict escalates, to the point where even Laura begins to second guess the motives of the girl she admires and loves so dearly. Her decision to stand up for herself, however, falters in the face of Virginia’s unexpected reaction to her defiance:

QUOTE
Whatever resistance she’d planned wavers. She had expected Virginia cruel, Virginia righteous, Virginia exultant and terrible, her face as hideously triumphant as it had been in those few, horrible moments outside the Wayfarer.

“This is why I need you.”

“Me?”

“God, you’re so good, Stearns.” Virginia’s voice breaks. “You’re sweet, and you’re kind, and just love people, even when they don’t deserve it, and you stop me from being–God–whatever I am.” She closes her eyes. She nods. “Yes, you’d have stopped me. I know you’d have stopped me. I’d have <i>let</i> you stop me.”

Laura tells herself this is true.
END QUOTE

But what will Laura tell herself when not even Virginia’s instinctive ability to manipulate the choristers can keep them all together? As the two girls grow ever closer in the face of opposition, what lengths will each of them go to when threatened with a broken heart or, worse, a mortified soul?

This exquisitely modern examination of the adolescent need to give oneself over to beauty and certainty, heedless of reality or consequences, is one of the best boarding school crime novels I’ve ever read! The World Cannot Give is also transcendent in its treatment of the beauty of choral singing, reminding me of my own school days in that and in the shifting loyalties and sudden heartbreaks of its painfully realistic depiction of troubled, yearning teens. I greatly enjoyed Tara Isabella Burton’s previous book Social Creature, and find the continued riff on toxic female friendships here even more relatable than I did there. Laura, unlike Social Creature’s Louisa, is motivated less by an ordinary desperation than by an existential hunger for romance and meaning. Both protagonists, however, serve as cautionary tales against reckless desire and the folly of unfettered self-absorption.