Y'ALL, THIS BOOK.

2020 has had some real highs and some real lows as far as my reads have gone, but this is definitely one of my top picks of the year. Queer horror! Stories layered on top of stories layered on top of stories!! A character who was kind of horrible but I wanted to hug / make-out with anyway!!! (I'm looking at you, Merritt.)

With one (or two?) of the timelines being in a historical queer gothic style, I know there will be comparisons to Sarah Waters. But the contemporary storyline, with it's descriptions of bugs and moss that made me squirm with discomfort, definitely felt more Carmen Maria Machado to me. This is my favorite kind of horror -- no hack/slash, but just a sense of unease that creeps in and intensifies over the course of the book. Let me tell you, I had some weird ass dreams over the few days I spent reading this.

For me, I think a tell for whether a book is great is that I can't stop thinking about it after I put it down. I went back and reread sections. I read up on Mary MacLane (it still blows my mind that she was a real woman who existed in real life and was openly bisexual and wrote a book in 1901 about wanting to marry the Devil -- WHAT???). I hunted down Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" because the narrator suggested it in the footnotes. With the illustrations and footnotes, and my constantly going back and rereading earlier sections as the story progressed, this is one of the rare books that I would have actually preferred in print format.

This book is so incredibly different that The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and thank god because I don't know if I could handle another story of homophobia right now. Plain Bad Heroines is dark, but in the exact kind of supernatural dark that I want to read right now (and not dark in "the world is horrible and your family is sending you to gay conversion therapy" way).

I think I liked the idea of this story more than the actual story. Something about it made it difficult for me to pick up and keep reading. Maybe I wasn't used to the style of writing, or maybe I was expecting something else. This was just an okay read for me and I really don't know what to say about it, since I cant quite put my finger on what I didn't like about it.

Plain Bad Heroines is turn of the century queer boarding school horror and then some. It is not just a book within a book. It is a book about a book about a book. No wait. It's about a movie about a book within a book. And did I mention someone in the book is writing a book about the movie about a book about a book? Anyway, I think you get it. It's a complicated idea that doesn't feel complicated at all when you're reading it. It feels twisty and magical. And creepy! So creepy. I made the mistake of reading it outside where flying bugs live and almost jumped out of my skin. An example of how much I liked this book: this book has a ton of (very clever) footnotes, but the arc I received was only downloadable in Adobe Digital Editions (1.3 rating in the app store if that gives you an idea of how bad it is) and the footnotes caused the app to freeze continuously. But I kept reading the book! And I read every footnote! And it was totally worth it!

Really enjoyed the suspense and characters. This is one of my favorite teen authors and I look forward to recommending this title wide and far!