From the opening sentences, author Penny Zang lured me into her world.
“How to write about a dead woman:
First, confirm she is dead. Dead enough not to mind…”

Her brilliant novel, Doll Parts, haunted me as I immersed myself into the world of dark academia. Ride-or-die friendships, Sylvia Plath-obsessed “sad girls,” disturbingly ghostly characters, rituals to appease specters, creepy professors and complicit college administrators…Zang’s story clawed its way under my skin, sinking into my subconscious. My shoulders knotted from the tension, the characters creeping into my dreams.

Maybe it was her impeccable attention to friendship details, from magic marker nail polish to switching outfits mid-outings to darker moments I won’t reveal. But the characters of Sadie and Nikki embedded themselves in my brain, so fully fleshed out that I didn’t need my imagination to fill in any gaps.

But Zang is equally gifted in creating atmosphere. You’ll wonder at the bonds of this friendship throughout the years, told in a dual timeline. You’ll hold your breath, hoping the Sylvia Club won’t claim another member. You’ll absorb the grittiness of the bar—and want to wash your hands after. You’ll shiver at the museum-like quality of the house—and want to leave dirty dishes in the sink.

Zang not only creates a mesmerizing world with rich characters, but she also addresses difficult topics—topics many of us knew too well during our college years in the 80s and 90s.

If you’re missing your childhood best friend, if you listened to Courtney Love on repeat, if you’ve ever feared your teenage secrets might follow you to adulthood…you need to read Doll Parts, debuting in August 2025.

Doll Parts is a slow burn, intoxicating read with an intriguing dual timeline, two compelling characters and a gothic, edgy feel that invites you into the story.

It is one of those mesmerising narratives, a literary delight, Sylvia Plath inspired and utilised, haunting in its own way and a delight to read.

I love this kind of novel. It speaks to me. Recommended.

I’ve had the honor of reading Penny Zang’s debut, DOLL PARTS. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect going into it, but WOW, it’s a dark, suspenseful book with mesmerizing characters. Told in dual-POV and dual-timeline, it follows the story of two friends, one unraveling the death of the other, set in both suburbia and a dark academia-style Ivy League. I’d call this mystery and thriller with a twisted touch of horror—this sort of book you start and can’t set down until you’ve gotten to the end. One of my favorite books this year!

An intriguing and creative debut novel with dueling timelines of "sad girls on campus" twenty years ago and another timeline of today.

Sadie has a baby and lives with her child's father, Harrison. Harrison is recently widowed by Sadie's former childhood friend, Nikki. So, Sadie and Nikki were estranged and never spoke for 20 years. Nikki dies, seemingly of suicide, and Sadie sits in the back at her funeral. 9 months later we skip and Sadie is living with her widow and has a baby with him.

If this seems weird and a bit unbelievable, you aren't alone in that thought!

We side with Sadie and see things from her perspective. We don't love Harrison, we aren't sure about Caroline, who is Nikki and Harrison's teen daughter.

Both mysteries are good, the past one is better, it is clever to be following two mysteries in different timelines because it gets away from the typical criticism of slow burn mysteries as that it can drag in the middle.

Why is it called Doll Parts? No idea! I do love the cover, though.

My favorite character was Nikki, the past segments are in her view point.

Lots of open ended things with no conclusion, but it works. I liked this and found i very readable, some of the minor characters didn't have enough characterization so I didn't know them as well. I did love the setting and the writing style.

A fresh new voice in women centered mystery/thrillers!

Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks/Landmark for the ARC. Book to be published August 26, 2025.

“What if you conjured a woman out of death and couldn’t put her back?”

Told in alternating timelines and voices, the story follows Sadie and Nikki, best friends until a life-changing event during their college years that left them estranged. In their freshman year, they were haunted by the deaths of several college women, dubbed "The Sylvia Plath Club," and by a professor whose obsession with them bordered on the inappropriate.

Fast forward to the present: Sadie is now married to Nikki’s widower, whom she met at Nikki’s funeral. However, the circumstances surrounding Nikki’s death don’t align with the girl Sadie once knew. Suspicion grows as Sadie begins to see Nikki around the house, with a chilling clue—Nikki’s dedication that reads, “To my bestie, I would never leave without you. I pinkie swear.”

What caused the rift between the friends? And what really happened to Nikki? As Sadie uncovers cryptic messages and clues Nikki left for her, she must unravel the truth before it’s too late.

This slow-burn mystery blends elements of The Virgin Suicides with a gripping whodunit.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC!

An excellent read for any and all readers! Author comes at you with both barrels and knocks you out of your shoes! Great job fleshing out all the characters. I give this book FIVE stars! Definitely recommend!

4 stars ⭐️ Dark, creepy and haunting! This book took me by surprise. I don’t usually pick up this kind of book but the description was too intriguing! I loved it!

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This story has a lot of really great ideas that pulled me in from the first few chapters - I really enjoyed the dual timeline POV and Nikki and Sadie's characters! The ending was heartbreaking and stuck with me for a while, but I was left feeling like something was missing.

While I liked the ideas, I felt there were a lot of gaps that caused them to feel separate more than intertwined together; I struggled with the pacing of the storylines, and I found myself paging back to double check and make sure I wasn't missing anything. Like what happened between the girls? Why aren't they friends anymore? Was I missing something?? I also wasn't a huge fan of the whole ghost Nikki thing - while I enjoy a good paranormal thriller, this one just felt odd and a bit of a stretch.

While this one wasn't for me, thank you for the ARC!

The thing I loved the most about this story was how each and every female character was a fully developed human you could imagine encountering in the world. Even the minor characters had ups and downs, grew and changed, held onto certain things and let go of others. You could fully imagine their interactions with one another because they felt like the argument you'd have with a friend or the snappy first judgement you'd make of a neighbor only to learn more about them later.

There was so much to like about this story, but the characters sealed the deal for me.

A debut novel that everyone should add to their list for this year immediately! This is suspenseful, haunting, and had me hooked from the very beginning!

I was curious about this one! Very vibey and atmospheric- loved the gen x music references! A quick read, but nicely done. Perfect for vacation / summer.

“Doll Parts” masterfully examined once-in-a-lifetime, all-consuming friendships and the vulnerability of college-age girls at the same time. I found the mention of limited access to counseling services to be very poignant, as this can be a contributing factor to issues with mental health on college campuses across the world and is a pressing issue. I felt that these real-world topics were handled within the story very well and provided a critique of the system as a whole while moving the narrative. The characters were nuanced and often relatable. I felt as though I were a part of Nikki and Sadie’s friendship and definitely understood the bond they had with one another. It really called to mind similar friendships I’ve had and was nostalgic for me. I finished this novel in a day and it kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time.

One for the weird girl fiction fans, poetic and haunting this was a great thought provoking read, incredibly creepy in parts!

This was a 4.5 rounded down for me. I loved the relationship building between Nikki and Sadie, and the end was very touching and heartbreaking. I am also a huge fan of horror, so the hauntings were right up my alley. (And hey, I was a huge fan of both Plath and Hole in high school, so this definitely resonated).

The answers to the mystery fell a bit flat for me though and the dead girls/creepy professor storylines didn't feel like they quite intertwined enough, hence the 4 stars. Overall, I did really enjoy this book though!

A haunting and well-written debut. Really poetic writing and so much heart. This is a story about the friendship between women, especially lost friendship, and the culture's obsession with dead women.Just the right amount of weird to balance the dark and tragic parts. I was disappointed when it ended and will probably read it again.

Doll Parts by Penny Zang is a brutal and unsettling collection that dives deep into body horror and psychological torment. The stories are raw, visceral, and often grotesque, pushing boundaries with vivid, nightmarish imagery. While not for the faint of heart, it’s a must-read for fans of extreme horror looking for something truly disturbing and memorable. Love the cover and title!

I initially liked the description of this so I dived right in. It was compared to The Virgin Suicides but the further I got into this the less I thought this was so. I found it to be more of a murder mystery/psychological thriller. The suicides that happened were all very suspect and I felt that there was more to the story very early on.

This did keep my attention however I didn't find the twists to be completly surprising. I felt like there were gaps in the story- yes Nikki and Sadie stopped being friends freshman year but why? There was never any falling out. Sadie's life inbetween that year of college and the present is pretty much a mystery. And what ever happened to Bernie?

There were also ghosts of the deceased which I also did not care for. I just don't think it added much to the story line.

This book has an intriguing premise, but it didn’t work for me. The whole ghost Nikki thing was just too weird. Unfortunately, this was a DNF.

After reading the description, I was almost immediately sold. I'd just gotten done reading The Virgin Suicides, a book that completely enamored and horrified me with its sheer absurdity, so I felt as though I was ready for something to follow it up and ease me back into the realms of the real world.

This book was... just okay in my opinion. It was incredibly well written, but at times very, very slow moving. Maybe it's because I am not a mother myself, but Sadie's timeline of NOW bored me. I'm not someone who needs to connect with characters to read them, but I was simply just bored by what she had going on. It became increasingly difficult for me to really care about what was happening in the present day, and most of that timeline felt as though I was learning backstory, while there never really was a story to build up to. Same with Nikki's THEN timeline. It was all giving me information and information about who they were, but never exactly showed me who they were, if that makes sense?

I have read a few books with a similar voice. It's definitely an acquired taste in narration for sure. This book absolutely was for Sad Girls and I truly could see it becoming something great, but it wasn't exactly for ME.

The description of this book caught my attention: Childhood best friends go to college together and experience something that tears their friendship apart. 20 years later, one of them is dead and the other somehow ends up pregnant by the dead friend's husband and living in her home.
Curious as to how and why this could/would come to be, I took the clickbait and started reading it.

The story is told from two points of view, that of Sadie in the present day and Nikki in the past. Sadie's story takes place about a year after Nikki's death. She is living in Nikki's home, in a relationship with Nikki's husband and struggling with being a new mother, while also trying to adjust to the suburban housewife lifestyle Nikki was living, something which is not at all Sadie's thing. Nikki's story takes us back to her and Sadie's freshman year of college, the year that their friendship ended. As Sadie navigates the present day and starts to think that there is more to Nikki's death than meets the eye, she is guided by the ghost of Nikki, both in her imagination and in literal clues Nikki has seemingly left specifically for Sadie to find. All the while, as the reader, I was questioning why and how Nikki felt such a strong connection to Sadie that she had left these clues for her to find, somehow knowing Sadie would end up living in her home after her death, even though they hadn't spoken in 20 years. It was very difficult for me to believe in this very deep connection that still wasn't strong enough to survive or overcome whatever had happened to the two in college.

The story from the past unravels very slowly for me and I really struggled to get through it. While the present day story also moved along pretty slowly for me, I found the chapters told from the present day to be a much easier read and more relatable.

As is clear in this book's bio, there is an obsessive focus on Sylvia Plath and her death. And like Sylvia Plath, Penny Zang's writing is poetic and artistic and figurative. In addition to Sylvia Plath's strong presence in this book, Loch Raven College, where Nikki and Sadie attend is a character all on its own. Penny's description of the college campus buildings and the general vibe of the school transports you to what feels like a whole different world. Depending on the reader, you may like or dislike the all girls boarding school vibe, where students clad in all black dresses hold seances and are obsessed with death. Unfortunately, this didn't work for me and contributed greatly to my struggle to get through this book.

I wish that I could say that the answers in the end made the journey worth it, but for me that just wasn't the case. The answers to all the questions I had throughout the book just felt incomplete, like I was told the reasons for everything, but I was unsatisfied with them.

Overall, I think that this book just wasn't right for me. It's simply not a style I enjoyed and I'm not necessarily the right target audience for it, but for the right reader, this might be exactly the kind of thing you'd love. My rating is based solely on my own reading interests and unfortunately, I think I just selected the wrong type of book for me.

With thanks to NetGalley and SOURCEBOOKS Landmark Publishing for the opportunity to read and review this ARC before its August 26th, 2025 release.