Unique, evocative, exciting. I don't totally see it as a horror novel, but I guess between the bees and the creepy boarding school, there is something there. This is quite a chunker for a debut novel, but the author handled the two timelines and many other moving parts well. I love some historical bits and a good setting, and this setting was spot on. I hope to hear more from the author.

Thank you NetGalley for the digital copy in exchange for my review.

Okay it’s been forever and I really enjoyed these first chapters — it’s just that time got away from me and now it’s three years later! But this was a bang-up opening and I still think about this book, so I’ll get back to it someday when the stars align.

I was so excited when I received a NetGalley approval for a digital advance reader copy of Plain Bad Heroines prior its publication in October 2020. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to download and read this 630 page book before it was archived. The following year, the electronic book was highlighted as being on super sale by Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, so I purchased and downloaded it to my nook. But I could never carve out time to read a 15-hour e-book. Just last week, I rediscovered it on Libby while I was searching for an audiobook to listen to as I worked remotely. The almost 20-hour audiobook lasted me about a week as I was only able to listen four or five hours a day.

The book braided together two storylines, roughly a century apart, circling around the Brookhants School for Girls. The 1902 storyline started out with a pair of younger Brookhants students - Flo and Clara - and continued with a third student - Eleanor - before shifting to the adults - Libby Brookhants and Alexandra Trills - who were left in their wake. The 21st century storyline focused on a pair of female actors - Harper Harper and Audrey Wells - who were both starring in a movie about Brookhants and the female author of the book upon which this movie was based - Merritt Emmons. There were lots of side characters that enhanced both storylines, but not so many that they were a challenge to keep up with.

Of the two storylines, I preferred the 21st century storyline. That storyline was a bit banal until approximately halfway into the audiobook, when the trio of girls moved to Rhode Island to start filming in close quarters at Brookhants. Once that happened, that storyline really took off. The 1902 storyline moved more slowly; I slept through a portion of the 1902 Libby/Alex storyline near the middle of the book, but I was still able to follow the story. But that storyline definitely had a very similar surreal vibe to The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.

Listening to the audiobook, I missed out on the illustrations in the print version, but I thought the trade off of having a fantastic narrator was worth it. I really enjoyed the Narrator Xe Sands, as her style of narration was very reminiscent of the narrator Death from The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which is one of my favorite audiobooks. It helped that the book was written with an unnamed omniscient narrator, who frequently addressed the Reader to involve the Reader in the story or to take the Reader aside to further explain things. My only complaint with the narrator was that, at first, it was a challenge to follow the chapter breaks because the narrator didn’t read chapter numbers just the chapter titles.

I would highly recommend the audiobook despite its length. And it inspired me to keep my e-book on my to be read list, as I think concentrating solely on the print version will be a different way to experience the narrative as opposed to listening to the audiobook while multitasking.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for giving me an advanced copy of this book to read and review.

If you like novels set in dark academia with some witches & murder thrown in, this is the book for you! It is big one - 640 pages - and I did get lost in parts, but overall an enjoyable read by a super creative author!

Oh boy. What a hefty tome with not much substance.
Every character in the present-day timeline was an obnoxious caricature that never really developed or revealed new layers. The whole plot twist/reveal about the film was both predictable and boring, and answered a question that I don't feel needed to be resolved. The best parts of this by far were the flashbacks to the two founders and their failed relationship.

Ooh time goes by and if i don't write the review right away...sigh. I'm trying to be better. The best i can do right now is give a star count...

Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for the ARC of this book. This book left my brain buzzing so much it's hard to know where to start.

Plain Bad Heroines switches between the past and present as it tells the story of an abandoned girls boarding school, closed after mysterious deaths plague the student body and over a hundred years later, when it is used as a set for a horror film. It's certainly a wild ride and I had a lot of fun reading it. The best parts for me were definitely the slow building of the horror and individual POV chapters from the five main characters.

The Plain Bad Heroines is a group of teens at a private school in the early 1900s run by a young widow on a secluded estate who have been inspired by a sapphic diary that has become a best seller. At least three of these girls end up dead in horrible circumstances, creating quite the mythology about what exactly happened. In today's timeline, a movie is being made based on a book about the deaths and the surrounding mysteries, staring one of those up-and-coming Big Stars and a former teen star who is also the daughter of a 1980s scream queen.

Overall, this book is creepy and fun. If you like stories about queer girls, history, psychological horror, ghost stories, and urban legends, you will probably enjoy this book a lot.

Yet another ARC that I didn't read until years after it was published....

Plain Bad Heroines is an enjoyable take on the passage of time, the influence of the written word, and the hysteria and/or mania that can sweep a small town (or, in this case, school) and how it affects the people living there. I enjoyed the back-and-forth with time despite my usual disinterest in historical fiction, and I liked the modern twist of the movie crew coming to reside at this supposedly-haunted location; it reminded me a bit of Grave Encounters, though the two couldn't be more tonally different.

Ultimately, this novel could have benefited from a harsher edit. It's a big story, but it's too long. I didn't feel like the pace was stable enough to keep my interest the entire way through, and when a book is that long, it HAS TO. Unfortunately, it was noticeable enough to change my overall enjoyment of the book when I finally got around to reading it.

Plain Bad Heroines is a whole mood. Perfect for when you want to dive into a long and layered story and just live in it for a season. The book itself, the design, is an aesthetic to die for. There are beautiful details throughout and even illustrations! If you love Dark Academia, The Brookhaunts School for Girls is *everything*--the three intersecting storylines follow:
Two young lovers at the school and their tragic death in the early 1900s, the making of a horror movie based on the cursed history of the school and the students in the present, an intricately plotted backstory of the school's founders.
There is a strong thread of feminine themes, struggles, and issues woven shot through the plot and I did favor one storyline which always makes it harder to jump back into the other ones when you're enjoying one narrative so much more. I also think this book could have been thinned down into a leaner version--It has taken me ages to finish. Very memorable and enjoyable.

Honestly, I was incredibly disappointed by this book. This is not a horror novel and should not be marketed as such. The third act is incredibly weak and this book, while ambitious, had eyes too big for its stomach. It was trying to do too much, and in doing so, did none of it well at all.

I enjoyed this book overall, however I did have some issues. It felt like I was waiting for the excitement to begin and it never did. I felt this less so about the flashbacks. I almost wish there were two books I could have read, as I would have loved more of each storyline.

I can't even fathom how one writes a book like this. There are several weaving plotlines that somehow still fit together perfectly, building on the creepiness as it goes until it's full out horror. I especially enjoyed seeing the characters from each others' view point, demonstrating that we are all the heroes in our own stories. The near-lack of men in this story is also something I really enjoyed, though I've only noticed that's the case just now.

In storyline one (two, and three), two actresses and a writer are working together to create the movie adaptation of the writer's only book that she wrote as a teenager. Though those relationships have their ups and downs, they become reliant on each other to survive the experience.

In the other storyline, you have the women that inspired the book and movie the modern women are working on. In 1902, tragedy fell on a girls school on a remote island in Rhode Island. A few months later, it happened again. And again. This past story line follows different girls and the women who ran the school to build the creepiness of the story as a whole.

I am very impressed by the handiwork required to keep this entire thing from collapsing under its own weight. The story is cohesive and haunting, at times funny, and always compulsively readable. I enjoyed my time with each of the characters, and as the gothic pieces began to fall into place, I was pleasantly surprised of what the picture showed.

While a little long and wordy the story of a story within a story is interesting. It definitely is not a horror novel instead it should have been marketed as more suspenseful or gothic. Unfortunately it rambles on a bit and is hard to pin down.

What fun! Queer horror comedy!
I truly enjoyed both the timelines at Brookhants, and the current timeline with the flirting actresses, and the potential for the curse to come back. Is there even a curse?
I loved how meta this whole story was, and how it frequently talked directly to the reader. Truly entertaining!

This was an enjoyable read, balancing the story of the present and the past, into a compelling story.

I absolutely loved this story.

It is twisty and long, but brilliantly pulled together. The stories of the past and the now and the film blend so well together that everything makes sense but not in a way that is so obvious as to ruin it.

Q: What do you get when you read a metafictional book which involves a metafictional movie and also an actual really-real book entrenched in the storyline?

A: A headache.

But also, A: brilliance.

I had a true love-hate relationship with this book. I loved parts and hated parts. I loved the story for chapters and then hated it for chapters. I lost count of the times during the first 400 pages when I very nearly just put it aside in the DNF pile.

But I finished it in the end.

I loved every part of the storyline set in the past. 1902 at Brookhaunts school is a story all on its own and I'd have devoured it all without hesitation. It's creepy and mysterious and dangerous and exciting and heartbreaking.

I had no problem with the modern part of the story in the last third or so of the book. But before that....ugh. The three main characters: Harper, Audrey, and Merritt, seem to be in a constant battle to see who can be the most obnoxious. Twenty-somethings acting like thirteen year olds and overdramatizing everything. At one point I headed to Amazon to see if somehow I'd missed the fact that this was a YA novel, YA novels being known for their over-the-top drama and angst and constant sexual tension and all that. Alas, DEAR READERS, I saw no sign that the book was YA.

Did you see what I did there, READERS? Because that brings me to the other complaint about this book. Authorial intrusion is a literary device best used cautiously and, most important, sparingly. Perhaps the most famous example of this device is Jane Austen: "Reader, I married him." 'Plain Bad Heroines' suffers from an extreme overabundance of this kind of thing. I'd say there's an authorial intrusion on at least 400 of the 600+ pages. I haven't sat down and counted, but it sure felt that way. And it got downright annoying.

Obnoxious heroines and an author who needs to remember her place aside, the story was excellent. Tragic deaths and doomed love triangles and cursed lands and holy cannoli, those yellow jacket wasps and their incessant buzz. These make for a tale that is intriguing and captivating and while not really scary, definitely uncomfortable.

I don't quite know where I stand on this book. Awful heroines. But....is that the point? Is that one more part of the metafiction? This is PLAIN BAD HEROINES after all. Did the author truly not want us to like any of her heroines? Am I just too old for this book?

The parts I loved, I really, really loved. The parts I hated made parts of the book almost not worth reading (I did, in fact, skim a bit in these parts). What do you do with a book like that? Well, READERS. what?

I really enjoyed the spooky atmosphere of this book; it had a consistent, unsettling feel and a quirky eeriness to it, also it was absolutely sexy. I loved all the women in it and I was rooting for all of them, even the ones I already knew met very bad ends. But, ultimately, it didn't make much sense! Atmosphere will only get you so far in a horror mystery—you've got to resolve the mysteries so they are explicable. Even supernatural stuff has to have some reasoning behind it; plot cannot live on spooks alone.

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N7 Space Trash rated a book really

I'd like to begin by thanking William Morrow and NetGalley. I was provided an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Plain Bad Heroines was one of my most anticipated fall reads of 2020. The synopsis immediately seized my interest, and that first blush of giddy anticipation when my request for the ARC was granted was immediate and genuine. Now that I've had time to process my initial impressions, however, I have mixed feelings about the novel overall.

There are many things that Plain Mad Heroines does well. It perfectly distills the best elements of the gothic genre; not an easy task, given how varied and ever-evolving that particular genre is. It does an equally wonderful job capturing - and building - an increasing sense of unease/dread. Of almost, but not quite, perfecting that prickle of awareness that something isn't quite right. It achieves this with a clever juxtaposition between the brooding, gothic backdrop of the early 1900s, and the cheap glamour of modern Hollywood.

Unfortunately, Plain Bad Heroines is a story, within a story, within a story, and the end result is...messy, at best. It's less than effective, and at times, disjointed, and, though it pains me to say it, incredibly dull. While it was still a novel I very much enjoyed overall, and an absolute treat for the Halloween season, it didn't quite live up to its full potential.

Writing quality/readability - 3/5 This is one of the rare sections where my score is on the fence. As I've mentioned, there are many things that Plain Bad Heroines does well. The issue is that the style and quality of the writing fluctuates almost as abruptly as the opposing time periods do. If the majority of the book was written in the same style, and focused exclusively on "the happenings at Brookhants," this section would easily score a 5/5. Unfortunately, the transition from one time period to the next is often less than smooth, and the difference in quality is stark. The 1902/Brookhants Academy timeline is far more compelling, and the flow and quality of the writing is solid. The same can't be said for the modern timeline, which, at times, suffered from slow, drawn out pacing, flat characterization, and far too much focus on a 40-something mean girl turned cougar. From a purely stylistic/technical standpoint, Mrs. Danforth's writing has moments where it shines. It's compelling, atmospheric, and full of crisp prose. Unfortunately, there are equally times where the opposite true: it's flat, repetitive, and bland. The swinging between the two extremes is the reason, unfortunately, for this middle-of-the-road score.

Plot - 3.5 / 5 This section is rounded up to a solid 3.5. The plot is...complex. As I mentioned, the novel is a story, within a story, within a story. Unfortunately, as ambitious and intriguing of a concept as that is in theory, it isn't executed very well in practice. We are first introduced to the protagonists Flo and Clara, two young lesbians attending the Brookhants School for Girls in 1902. The two are forced, as are many of the young women attending the school, to keep their relationship hidden. They also begin their relationship at the height of the Mary MacLane craze, which has reached an explosive peak with the publication of Mary MacLane's memoir. The start of the novel lays the groundwork for their untimely and tragic demise, shortly after the truth of their relationship is discovered. This firmly establishes the lore of the Brookhants curse, which remains a recurring, prevalent theme throughout the 1900s-centric timeline.

The plot then introduces us to Merrit Emmons, a reclusive, embittered author, who has written an account of the strange, possibly supernatural occurrences surrounding the school. She has also, at the start of the novel, recently sold the film rights to her work. Up and coming actresses Harper Harper and Audrey Wells play the roles of Clara and Flo. But as time wears on, and the timelines begin to blur, its increasingly clear, through a series of inexplicable events, that curses aren't so easily broken.

Overall, this was a delightfully unsettling, gothic plot. The descent into paranoia, hallucinations, and madness during the Brookhants section of the novel is dizzying, lush, and keeps you on the edge of your seat, eager to sink your teeth into the heart of the story. The same, unfortunately, can't be said for the modern timeline. While there are moments where the modern timeline shines, and the 'bleed' of the curse was a nice touch, the Brookhants timeline carried the novel so heavily, the modern timeline felt like an afterthought.

Characterization - 3/5 This is another section, unfortunately, that highlights the discrepancies between the two timelines. The cast of the Brookhants School for Girls was vibrant, fleshed out, and sympathetic. I adored the dynamic and relationship that Libbie and Alex shared, and I lost track of the number of times my heart broke for Alex as Libbie scorned her long time 'wife' for younger, impressionable women.

As deeply flawed as the characters were, you desperately wanted things to work out for them, in the end. The same can't be said for Merrit, Harper, or Audrey. They felt flat and one dimensional, at best. Merrit's casual cruelty and sneering, snide behavior grew old quickly, and, predation on younger women aside, she came across as trying too hard to not be "like other girls." In fact, none of the characters are exactly likeable. The difference is, while it's done well in one sense, it sours the tone significantly in another.

This is one of the things that Mrs.Danforth does incredibly well. The world of is rich, compelling, and fully realized. It leaves you eager to race through the pages and immerse yourself in it fully. It perfectly balances the bleak with more lighthearted elements, and the surreal, unsettling lore of Brookhants lingers long past the last page, like a voice in the fog.

In conclusion, Plain Bad Heroines is a wonderful autumn read, perfectly balancing classic gothic horror, tongue in cheek social commentary, and solid LGBT representation. All of the above make for an enjoyable, memorable read.