Creepy, suspenseful, and gripping without being hard-core horror. I loved the gothic feel and the Vermont setting. Riveting! I love this book!

When an abandoned boarding school gets bought by a mysterious benefactor, a journalist decides to do a story on the transaction. She has a personal attachment to the school, and when a body is discovered on the grounds her article almost becomes a crusade. Author Fiona Barton strings together a series of unrelated events and forces them into the well-written but failed novel The Broken Girls.

Despite the two decades that have passed, Fiona Sheridan can’t let go of the facts surrounding the murder of her sister, Deb. Fiona’s boyfriend, a cop in their town of Barrons, Vermont, wishes she’d let it all go, but she can’t. That’s why Fiona finds herself at odd hours wandering the grounds of Idlewild, the shuttered boarding school where Deb’s body was found.

Unlike other people, though, Fiona doesn’t have to deal with uncertainty when it comes to the identity of her sister’s murderer. Deb’s boyfriend, Tim Christopher, was convicted of the crime and sent to prison for life. He’s spent 20 years declaring his innocence, but Fiona isn’t buying it. His assertion most likely comes from the arrogance that only the wealthy can afford; Tim’s family once owned Idlewild.

Until now. Fiona receives word of the school getting sold to a woman who seems to have no connection to it. The news sparks something in Fiona, and she pitches the idea of doing a story on the sale to the magazine where she works. Her editor lets her start working on the story with reluctance. Even though it’s been so long, no one in Barrons has forgotten the details of Deb’s death.

As Fiona starts doing research, a body is discovered on the grounds of Idlewild by the crew hired for renovations. Fiona is disheartened by the reality of what Idlewild was: a school where parents sent their daughters when those daughters didn’t match society’s standards and needed to be hidden from the world. At least Deb had a family who mourned her death. The mystery girl, it seems, had no one. Fiona is determined to give the girl some dignity by searching for her identity. The more research she does, though, the more she gets drawn into the shadows that persist around Idlewild and the secrets they hide.

Author Simone St. James takes a story that could have blossomed with possibilities and instead lets it wither with the book’s biggest weakness: too many unrelated ideas. The book goes back and forth between a group of friends who attended Idlewild in 1950 and Fiona in 2014 as she pursues the story of the school and its tragedies. All of the characters talk about Mary, a ghost purported to haunt the school, but readers only get Mary’s story through second-hand information.

An abandoned school haunted by a ghost seems to offer the perfect setting for a story juxtaposing the past and the present. Instead, St. Simone tries to force a string of unrelated events into one cohesive novel. Her strategy doesn’t work and will leave readers frustrated as they keep looking for connections between Mary, the mystery girl, and Fiona’s sister but find none. The only thing the girls have in common is that all three died on the grounds of Idlewild, and that fact alone isn’t enough to carry a book.

The writing itself is lovely. St. Simone offers descriptions of small-town Vermont in rich detail that will bring the streets and the landscape to life. Readers will find it easy to picture Barrons in the fall. Unfortunately, strong descriptions can’t save the story. The novel, then, becomes a collection of pages of unfulfilled potential. I recommend readers Bypass The Broken Girls.

I enjoyed this book immensely and easily could have raced through it if life had not interceded. The theme of "broken" girls runs through three separate timelines and mysteries, and St. James does a wonderful job of interlinking these seemingly disparate narratives. Everything falls into place by the end, for the most part.

The story jumps around from three separate decades in a small Vermont town. In the early decades of the twentieth century, there is a tragic death of a young local woman. In the 1950s at Idlewild School, a boarding school for wayward and unwanted teenage girls, one young girl goes missing and is presumed by authorities to have run away with a boy. Her friends at the school believe very differently. In modern day a somewhat cynical and reserved journalist is obsessed with the decades-old murder of her teenager sister and, along with her police officer boyfriend, becomes determined to get to the bottom of those events. It is a lot to juggle but it actually all works very well here, as the one thing all of these events share in common is that they took place on Idlewild grounds, long believed to be haunted.

As Fiona and her boyfriend, Jaime, realize quickly into the investigations, Idlewild is being renovated for a grand re-opening, much to the dismay of nearly everyone in the small town that houses this institution. Fiona's attempts to investigate the 1990's death of her sister leads her to the unsolved mysteries of the missing girls from earlier periods, and her investigation and discoveries are harrowing and unexpected. I love the theme of broken girls and as with all St. James's books, she has much to say about the realities of being a woman in our culture and what it means to be viewed as "broken" and undervalued. She has important messages here for women that successfully turn the sordid narratives into something empowering. I also love the generational bridges she makes by the end of the book. It is the young and the elderly females in our world after all who are viewed with the most contempt, and her messages seek to rectify that.

There is, as always with St. James's books, a romance simmering below the surface. I would not necessarily define her books as romances, but for romance lovers, I found the romance here very satisfying. I loved Jaime in this book, and I feel admiration for the man who commits himself to an edgy and at times closed off and wary woman. He is tested more than once but he comes through for Fiona every time. They have nice sexual chemistry here too and their romance interweaves well with the external tensions in the stories.

My one reservation about the book is that the ghost story itself is not as convincingly handled as the other threads. The ghost is important to all the narratives here, as it provides the necessary link among them, but the story behind the existence of the ghost is perhaps a bit flimsy, as is the reason for the ghost's continued existence, and the resolution too of this plot. St. James always includes ghosts in her mysteries, and to my mind nothing tops the ghosts that populated The Other Side of Midnight, still my personal favorite of all her books. Nevertheless, The Broken Girls is a solid and worthy competitor in her growing backlist of novels, and I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it.

I have to be honest, what intrigued me most about this book was the title and cover. That being said, I really enjoyed it, especially the writing style of the author. The characters were well drawn, and I loved the time hops from chapter to chapter and the way the story unfolded bit by bit. The only reason I did not give this one 5 stars is because the paranormal aspect threw me for a loop--but I think a lot of readers will love it. I kind of wish the author would write another book featuring the heroine (who's a reporter) as she's a very memorable character.

3.5 stars
The beginning of this story completely pulled me in...a young girl, alone, on a dark road road near woods...when all of sudden she's no longer alone! What an atmospheric, dramatic start to a story that was just outright creepy in parts. As stated in the blurb, the novel alternates between the girl's boarding school in 1950 and Fiona's life in 2014. Fiona actually has ties to the school as her sister was murdered in the field surrounding the school. The question that has taken over Fiona's life is: what really happened to her sister on the night she was murdered all those years ago? There were no witnesses, no footprints, no evidence at the scene, yet her boyfriend was tried and convicted...did he really kill her or was there a more sinister force behind her death?

Then we have the storyline from 1950 and the four roommates who became best friends until one of them vanishes. For the first half of the book, I was slightly more interested in this storyline as the boarding school was just plain creepy and I really liked the girls; I felt bad for each of them. The author did a fantastic job of creating an atmosphere of gloom, dread, and eeriness. I felt worried for the girls. I was actually much more invested in the girls' story than I was Fiona's, mainly because I found Fiona hard to like or relate to. Things seemed to fall into place a little too easily for her.

I found the first half of the book to be much faster paced than the second half. I'm not sure exactly how or why my reading shifted but it did and I found myself skimming scenes along with losing my ability to "believe" the ghost story. For me, a little ghost goes a long way and in the second half the ghost story became a bit over the top for me. I was surprised by the resolution to the girls' story from 1950, much more so than Fiona's which was resolved way too easily and predictably in my opinion. Overall, this was a stronger first half story for me. If you enjoy atmospheric ghost stories with strong alternating timelines and subtle mysteries then definitely give this a try!

This one was fantastic. The Broken Girls blends several genres making this one even more unique. There is a mix of historical fiction, contemporary, gothic and supernatural among others. There are two storylines - one set in 1950, the other in 2014 - with a mystery at the center of it all. At times, this becomes more like a ghost story than a mystery. There is no other book like The Broken Girls. If you're looking for something different in the mystery/gothic genres, this is the one for you!

Fantastic! I loved this, it was a quick read that sucked me in immediately. I love the blend of contemporary and historical as well as the supernatural and the natural. There was a wonderful creepy atmosphere throughout and the story was engaging and satisfying. I will definitely be reading more from this author.

Idlewild, a boarding school for ‘troubled’ girls, is haunted by the mysterious Mary Hand. Idlewild is isolated from the rest of the world. It houses girls from several different backgrounds. Some are illegitimate children of prominent social figures, others have dealt with traumatic experiences. These girls, along with the teachers, live in fear of the ghost.
Sixty years later, Idlewild has been abandoned and is only a site where kids hang out. A stranger has bought Idlewild for restoration, and Fiona Sheridan wants to do a story about it. For Fiona, Idlewild means more to her than most. It is where the body of her older sister was found.
While touring Idlewild with the owner’s son, the restoration crew discovers another body. Fiona and her policeman boyfriend Jamie, dig into Idlewild’s past to discover who she is and what happened to her.
Town secrets run deep, and it is up to Fiona to bring them to the surface.
The Broken Girls has been the best mystery thriller I’ve read in a long time. I used it as my ‘book on the night stand’ to read before bed and from the beginning I was creeped out. Mary Hand was truly terrifying. At several parts in the book, my heart was pounding in my chest. I haven’t read a book like this in years.
The book goes back and forth between present day and the 1960s. We get a glimpse of life at Idlewild with a group of close knit girls. We know why they are sent to Idlewild, and the experiences each of them have with Mary Hand. We follow Fiona as she tries to put the pieces together and she even has her own experiences with the ghost that haunts the property.
My favorite thing about The Broken Girls (besides the thrill) is the relationships. The close relationship that the girls have with each other is touching. They are in a place they don’t really want to be, but find comfort with each other. Fiona and Jamie’s relationship is unusual in that she’s a journalist and he’s a cop. The two don’t normally mix. But they have an interesting, easy going relationship that is refreshing to read about.

I was lost in the spooky overgrown weedy brushes of the lush coulee with ten of my Traveling Sisters. This was one of our largest group reads that we have done and it was such a great, fun read. I really enjoyed discussing everyone’s thoughts on this one. Interesting with such a large group we ended up in the same coulee but were split into different sides of the coulee.

The Broken Girls is a creepy gothic, suspenseful, supernatural thriller that pulled us deep into the weedy brushes along with this interesting and entertaining story. We all settled in under the sun and soon things started to get a little dark. Our hair started rising as shivers ran up our backs as the wind howled down on us in the coulee.

Simone St. James does a good job creating an interesting atmospheric setting here with the vivid descriptions of Idlewild Hall a creepy, eerie abandoned boarding school that was like a character itself. We all enjoyed exploring the ruins along with Fiona and the eerie feeling it left us. We loved being taken into the past when the school was open to troubled girls and we meet four interesting damaged girls all with their own conflict. We learn their dark and tragic backstories and this became the favorite of the two timelines for us.

Simone St. James does a good job balancing a mystery with the supernatural that surprised some of us with how much we enjoyed the ghost story to this one. Things got really quiet amongst us as we learned of the ghost that haunts the school and at times all that could be heard was the faint sound of “I will survive” playing from the coulee.

Towards the end is where we started to split into different sides of the coulee. For some of the TS, there was just too much going on in this story for them and they felt it didn’t pull together well enough to leave them completely satisfied. For me and the rest of the TS we thought everything tied together well and we were completely satisfied in the end. We highly recommend!

Publication Date: March 20, 2018

Thank you so much to NetGalley, Berkley Publishing Group and Simone St. James for a copy to read and review.

All of our Traveling Sisters Reviews can be found on our sister blog:
http://www.twogirlslostinacouleereading.wordpress.com

The Broken Girls, double stories of mysteries on the grounds of a girl's school built in the early part of the 20th century and bought to be rebuilt in the 21st. The characters draw you in to their lives and their pursuit to solve the mysteries surrounding people close to them. Fiona searches for answers to her sister's murder, while Katherine, Cece and Roberta search for the story behind the disappearance of their friend Sonia. Does the appearance of Mary Hand, a figure in black hold the clues?

This book has it all, thrills, chills, suspense, and of course drama. Highly recommend to anyone looking for a book that will give them chills like a haunted house but while riding a roller coaster. A must read for thriller and horror lovers. The ending makes you happy, but there's many emotions in between.

3.5 A storyline fifty years apart. A deserted school for girls, a school that in the fifties, housed girls that had problems. Four become fast friends, and then one goes missing never forgotten, but never seen again. A murder in more current times, body found on school grounds and a sister who wants answers. Now a wealthy woman is undertaking a renovation of the school, opening and exposing old secrets. Oh yes, and we must forget the ghost!!

The atmosphere, spooky, gothic, tense, the definite star of this novel. Fast paced, quite a page turner, constant revelations. Did like the past story more than the present one, which is often the case with these dual storylines. the atmosphere though kept me immersed, and in fact found this entertaining, until the last quarter where it just became too muddled. Too much happening, too many coincidences thrown in the mix, and then the writing faltered. Hence, my rating which for most of the book would have been higher just for the enjoyment factor.

This was a sisters read, one which we all enjoyed in varying levels. Quite a good discussion ensued.

ARC from Netgalley.

"The Broken Girls" is a story from 2014 that intersects with a mystery from 1950 both set in the same Vermont small town. The story slowly becomes a good old-fashioned ghost story to make it even more exciting. The book is filled with interesting characters. You make quick judgements on the characters that change as the story progresses. The women are all strong-willed survivors. The story keeps you guessing and moves back and forth from 1950 and 2014 as all the questions are answered. Thanks for a great story Ms. St. James.

This is a dark, creepy, atmospheric story!

This story’s synopsis is perfect. It doesn’t offer too much or too little information. So in an effort to not be repetitive I will spare you my own synopsis. I was first drawn to the cover of this book and was looking forward to a creepy mystery. Throw in a bit of historical fiction and I was darn right excited to read this book!

This story follows the famous alternating time period layout. As this story progresses in each time period, 1950 and 2014, the mystery thickens and becomes increasingly more complicated.

I found the friendship of Idlewild Hall roommates CeCe, Katie, Sonia, and Roberta quite fascinating. It is 1950 and these four girls were all send away to boarding school, they have been discarded and labeled as uncontrollable troublemakers. Were these girls actually troublemakers or when things got tough did their families decide to just send them away rather than working through their troubles? Of course my modern day thinking is quite different than the 1950’s. Things were not talked about like they are now, so I find it quite disheartening that these girls were sent away and slapped with a label so easily.

I thought it was particularly clever that the textbooks used at Idlewild Hall were the only textbooks the school has ever had. They made the perfect vessel for past and present students to tell the stories of the school’s past within those pages, really aiding to the mystery and intrigue of this story.

I enjoyed the modern day, 2014 storyline, with girlfriend/boyfriend Fiona and Jamie. I thought her being a journalist and him a cop created the right amount of tension between them. There are always trust issues when it comes to the law and the press and this relationship is no exception, as hard as they tried to not let it affect their relationship.

The vivid descriptions pulled my right into the cover of this book and brought this story to life!

1950 was not an easy time for teenage girls who didn't fit a specific mold. Put a group of these girls in an isolated boarding school that might be haunted, and you have an irresistible setting. In this same Vermont town, 54 years later, we have a different young woman living an entirely different kind of life. The way these characters' lives intersect and entwine is a fascinating, complex, well-told story.

While I loved the last half of this book, I had some problems in the early stages. We have the two timelines, plus the murder of Fiona's sister, which occurred between these two timelines. Four of the schoolgirls from the 1950 timeline have narrating parts, and then there is Fiona's narrating part in the current timeline. Consequently, there is a whole lot of shifting in perspectives, as well as what initially feels like too many plots and subplots.

Despite the multitude of directions this story takes, the pace moves quite slowly through the first third of so of the book. We're given excessive detail on unimportant things, such as one of the girls playing soccer. So I found myself resisting the urge to skim, and it took me a bit to get a foothold in the story. By the midway point, when the pace picks up and the past starts to reach into the present, I was completely hooked.

If you like stories heavy on atmosphere, with memorable characters and just enough supernatural edge to scare you with possibilities, definitely give this book a try.

Thank you to Berkley Publishing and Netgalley for the chance to read and review this novel.

The Broken Girls is everywhere on social media right now as one of this month's Book of the Month choices, and definitely seems a worthy pick. This book has been beckoning me since November when I was approved to read it on Netgalley, but I haven't had a chance to fit it in until now. Based on the blurb alone, I knew this would be an interesting story, but it ended up being so much more than I expected.

Torn between four and five stars, I decided to round up because of Simone St. James' clever and deep plotting. There are numerous layers to the story, slowly fed to eager readers through the course of the book. The story effortlessly weaves through the past and modern day, interconnecting the two in the most interesting and unexpected ways.

Idlewild Hall shows its smiling, jagged teeth to every girl dropped at its doors. With a past as haunted as that of each of its inhabitants, it's only fitting this boarding school is a place for the misfits and discarded girls of 1950. Four girls bond over their murky pasts and current fears, when suddenly one of them goes missing.

In 2014, the spooky Idlewild Hall is purchased to undergo renovations. When Fiona Sheridan, a local journalist, hears of the upcoming project, she decides it is the perfect chance to dig into the history of the eerie place where her own sister's body was found 20 years prior. The circumstances surrounding Fiona's sister's murder never sat right with her, and she is determined to uncover the truth.

There is a shift happening in our culture, a huge wave of "out with the old, in with the new" in terms of mental illness awareness and the acceptance of women as equals in our world. Of course, there are still leaps and bounds to be made, but with modern books like this one and numerous others boasting these topics, it sure feels like our world is quickly changing. As we delve into the past perspectives of the girls at Idlewild Hall in 1950's Vermont, it was easy to see how different life was in regards to both of the topics I've mentioned. Simon St. James does an exquisite job of capturing the past's "buck up and get on with life" attitude through the stories of the forgotten girls at Idlewild Hall. I especially loved the bond between the girls at the boarding school, allowing them to become the family they didn't have. Society's rejects found love and acceptance in each other.

I can't get enough of books with spooky homes or buildings holding long-buried histories, allowing the reader to uncover the pieces while getting a few chills up the spine in the process. I wasn't expecting to be quite as spooked as was, however! This was definitely one I preferred to read in the daytime, but with a story so gripping I wasn't able to put it down at night, staying up well past midnight to figure out the conclusion.

One of my favorite parts of The Broken Girls was learning about real-life Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. I have a huge passion for being able to learn through the stories I read, and it's all the better when real history meets fiction. I was especially interested to learn about the female Nazi guards at Ravensbrück, as this was something I was completely unaware of. This was a well-researched and interesting read all-around.

I hope you will pick up The Broken Girls when it releases on March 20th or start reading it now if this was your BOTM pick!

Mix a little paranormal woo-woo with a murder-mystery and you'll hook me. The Broken Girls by Simone St. James did just that but the icing on the cake was Idlewild Hall, a gothic, menacing looking boarding school that once was home to troubled girls in the 1900's. Hells yes. St. James pulled me in as she shared pov from present-day 2014 and those of students in 1950.  Turn on the light and grab a cup of cocoa before settling into this story.

Thanks to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group for ARC.

I honestly love a good mystery and paranormal book every now and again. So, when I read the description for The Broken Girls through BOTM I was intrigued. Happily I found it was available as ARC through NetGalley. So, I requested and was granted a copy.

The book, itself, travels back and forth for storyline purposes between 2014 and 1950.

In 2014, Fiona is still reeling over 20 years later since the murder of her older sister, Deb in Vermont on Idlewild Hall Boarding School. See Fiona can’t seem to shake what happened to Deb all those years ago. Even though her sister’s supposed killer was arrested and convicted, Fiona questions not only what actually happened, but if the man jailed is the killer.

Fiona, also, happens to be a journalist just like her famous journalist father. So the journalist deep in her blood decides to write a story about the long shut down boarding school grounds, Idlewild Hall, where her sister’s body was found all those years ago. See, the boarding school grounds have been bought by a mysterious benefactor and is to be renovated to be reopened. So, Fiona decides to write a story about this in hopes to get the bottom of sister’s tragedy once and for all.

But in doing so, we are thus given a glimpse into the lives and world of the young teenage girls who lived and attended Idlewild Hall in 1950 in Vermont. It is their stories that somehow bridge the past and present. Because in trying to finally put Fiona’s sister to rest once and for all, Fiona stumbles upon the mystery of one of the 1950s girl’s disappearance all those years ago.

Plus throughout this book, the readers are given front row access to the fact that Idlewild Hall is apparently haunted. This haunting is due in part to the possibility of another young girl (Mary Hand) dying many years even before the 1950s on the grounds, too. The folklore was that Mary was not at rest and was indeed haunting the Idlewild Hall grounds showing others their worst fears imaginable when she shows herself to them.

All-in-all, this novel did a wonderful job bridging the the past and the present stories. And the mystery was definitely one that was worthy of reading to find out just how all of this would play out and come together in the end.

There's an old girl's school on the outskirts of the city. When Fiona finds out they are going to rebuild it, she's horrified. Her sister was killed and her body was left near Idlewild. It haunts her to think of it operating again. She's almost obsessed with the death of her sister. Her killer is in jail but it doesn't make Fiona feel better. She convinces her boss to let her write an article about it and begins to do some research on it...

Berkley and Net Galley let me read this book for review (thank you). It will published March 20th.

Fiona is dating a cop. He tries to get her to let go of the pain of her sister's death but she can't. She talks to the son of the woman who is going to refurbish the school and he offers her a tour. As she tours, the contractors interrupt them. They've found a body in the well. Now Fiona really has something to investigate. The girl is unknown, the body has been there since the early 1950's, it's a cold cold case and the police don't have the resources to do much investigation. There's nothing to identify the body. But Fiona is relentless. She's going to research and find out who it is. She does but it doesn't help her figure out she died.

The girls that attended this school were sent because they were illegitimate, were hard to control, or had mental problems. If you didn't fit in the box, they sent you here to a new box where you wouldn't be embarrassing. The dead girl was an orphan. She'd had a hard sad life and Fiona can't let her die alone.

Another thing the school and even the police had in common was secrets. As those are revealed, the story gets more complicated and intricate.

This is a tense story with lots of drama and unexpected outcomes. I found it intriguing and interesting. It's well worth a read.