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Plain Bad Heroines
Paperback
General FictionGeneral GLBTQIA Fiction
Publisher Price: $22.00
ISBN13: 9780062942869
Publisher: William Morrow & Company
Published: Oct 5 2021
Pages: 656
Weight: 1.85
Height: 1.60 Width: 5.90 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
"A sapphic murder-mystery about two students from The Brookhants School for Girls, Flo and Clara, who are mysteriously killed by a horde of yellow jackets back in 1902. At the time, a memoir by Mary MacLane was spreading like wildfire, as her writing detailed her love for another women. Considered scandalous, the book was banned in many places and thought to be dangerous to impressionable young women. After the deaths of Flo and Clara, more murders follow those who frequent the school. In modern times, a struggling author has been offered a deal to make a movie about her book detailing the murders at Brookhants decades later. Meeting up with two actresses playing the lead roles of Flo and Clara, the director has a nasty trick up his sleeve. As the novel flashes between the past and the present, the truth is slowly revealed in thrilling tones." --Addy
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire . . . [and] what makes all this so much fun is Danforth's deliciously ghoulish voice . . . exquisite. --Ron Charles, THE WASHINGTON POST
A multi-faceted novel, equal parts gothic, sharply funny, sapphic romance, historical, and, of course, spooky. --ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
Named a Most Anticipated Book by Entertainment Weekly - Washington Post - USA Today - Time - O, The Oprah Magazine - Buzzfeed - Harper's Bazaar - Vulture - Parade - HuffPost - Refinery29 - Popsugar - E! News - Bustle - The Millions - GoodReads - Autostraddle - Lambda Literary - Literary Hub - and more!
The award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative and original gothic horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girls--a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit
Our story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it the Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary's book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Less than five years later, the Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever--but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way.
Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer Merritt Emmons publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the haunted and cursed Gilded Age institution. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation and a searing piece of Hollywood satire, starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, oppo-site B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern her-oines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled--or perhaps just grimly exploited--and soon it's impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins.
A story within a story within a story and featuring black-and-white period-inspired illustrations, Plain Bad Heroines is a devilishly haunting, modern masterwork of metafiction that manages to combine the ghostly sensibility of Sarah Waters with the dark imagination of Marisha Pessl and the sharp humor and incisive social commentary of Curtis Sittenfeld into one laugh-out-loud funny, spellbinding, and wonderfully luxuriant read.
Full of Victorian sapphic romance, metafictional horror, biting misandrist humor, Hollywood intrigue, and multiple timeliness--all replete with evocative illustrations that are icing on a deviously delicious cake. -O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
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