An 18-year-old heads off to school on a mysterious island, but she finds the institution and the nearby forest more sinister than she could have imagined.
After her identical twin sister, Ada, drowns, Evie’s mom sends her to Northcroft, the school Ada attended. The elite boarding school located on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia was founded by Evie’s ancestor, and her absent father is the principal. Upon arriving, Evie runs into TV star Holland, a former classmate and longtime crush—and they share an undeniable attraction. The intensity of their relationship grows even as girls around them go missing. The mysterious disappearances are seemingly linked to the dark, off-limits forest beyond the school’s walls and to the Crown and Grave, a secretive, elitist group of legacy students. The forest also appears to be a catalyst for the dark impulses Evie’s been feeling for years and which she’s having a harder time ignoring. The story’s narrative momentum is slow to build, making it difficult to enter the novel’s world and connect with the characters. Patient readers will find that the story eventually hits its stride, and the pace quickens in time for a gruesome finale. The queer romantic relationships are highly sexual, although the sex scenes feel unnecessarily redundant, doing little to further the story. Most major characters are coded white.
Unevenly paced and overstuffed queer supernatural body horror.
(Horror. 14-18)