Bookrate

‘It’s a terrible story and one way to tell it is this: two girls in love and a fog of wasps cursed the place forever after…’‘Brimming from start to finish with sly humour and gothic mischief, Plain Bad Heroines is a brilliant piece of exuberant storytelling by a terrifically talented author’ SARAH WATERS In 1902, at an all girl’s boarding school in Rhode Island, students Flo and Clara are madly in love with each other, as well as completely obsessed with The Story of Mary MacLane, the scandalous debut memoir by 19 year old MacLane. A copy of this book is found splayed in the woods near the two girls’ dead bodies after a horrific yellow jacket attack. Within five years The Brookhants School for Girls is closed. Its buildings left empty. But not before three more people died on the property, each in a troubling way…Over a hundred years later, Brookhants is in the news again when wunderkind writer Merritt Emmons publishes a book on the queer history surrounding the “haunted” gilded-age boarding school and that book is about to be adapted into a controversial film starring THE Harper Harper-celesbian megastar-as Flo, opposite B-list actress Audrey Wells, as Clara.As the three ambitious young women arrive at Brookhants to begin filming past and present become grimly entangled. Or perhaps just grimly exploited. Soon, it’s impossible to tell quite where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins…For fans of Sarah Waters, Curtis Sittenfeld and Shirley Jackson, Plain Bad Heroines is by turns sharply witty and deeply unsettling: a modern gothic novel that is utterly immersive and hugely compelling.