I'm so happy I was able to get my hands on a galley of Plain Bad Heroines! I'd been wanting to read it ever since I saw a blurb for it on goodreads, and was not at all disappointed. PBH is a well written story within a story, with the two timelines interwoven so expertly. My only grievance with PBH is that the story really isn't horror for me, while there are some creepy aspects, I wasn't ever on edge or scared while reading.

Y’all, I had an entire post already for this book. It was a solid 2.5. Then 80% hit, and it got turned up! This was a rollercoaster of emotions, so bare with me.

This is a story within a story. You have the creepy yellow jacket story of Flo and Clara from 1902. Then, we go to present day..ish to Harper Lee Harper (Harper Harper) playing Flo in a horror film based off of Merritt Emmons’s book. Audrey Wells, part of the mother/daughter scream team plays Clara.

You see, after the horrific death of F + C, 5 years later, they school closed its doors forever because of some mysterious deaths. Basically, a curse. So, now, Harper, Audrey, & Merritt venture off to the school, that hasn’t opened its gates since it closed. It intertwines as you don’t realize if the horror is the movie, or if it’s real life from a curse.

I was going to leave this out of my review, but I can’t stop thinking about it. There’s a scene where a minor character drives through a house yard and gets into an accident. After driving the dog of the house attacks the woman because she is covered in blood and there are kids in the yard screaming. (Looked like a zombie). Of course, the author had to make the dog attack from a pitbull mix. Could have just said dog, but no. 🙄 “I’m sorry it happened but this is about what she did, not what our dog did in reaction.” while it was nice to see it was “justified” it still validates everyone’s notion that pibbles are vicious creatures, when really they’re just on land sea lions. I understood the car crash, but the dog attack seemed excessive. That could be because of my stance of pibs, but that’s my opinion. Okay, off my soapbox.

Because this is two stories in one, I felt this didn’t flow as well as it could have. It would just stop abruptly and go into the other story without any type of flow or way to tie into the next story. This could have been done a bit better and the jaggedness of the stories made it hard to really get a rhythm in reading the book. This truly had my ADD on high alert because we had this story, that story, footnotes, narrators, side humor, side thoughts, tangents happening like it was me telling the story, etc etc. it was everywhere and so was my brain. I also believe a lot of the passages were just.. excessive (see above about car crash) There was a lot of paragraphs that didn’t help with character development or add to the plot, so I felt it was just filler.

Overall, I enjoyed the older story more. I really was bored with Audrey, Merritt, and Harper until about 80% through and we hit the hot springs. Y’all, this was IT! It saved the ENTIRE book. I still stand by everything I said before with a lot of excessive writing that does not come to the plot or characters, but HANG. IN. THERE. [you DNF’ers].

This is labeled as adult horror, but this screamed YA for me. The characters were amazing, and truly made the story. I wish the journey to get to the end was as good as the actual end. Thank you William Morrow & NetGalley for the gifted copy. This one is out October 20th.

Plain Bad Heroines is amazing and I just read a glowing bit about it in the Washington Post, so I think it's safe to say this novel, which contains a multitude of genres mixed together in a truly unique way, should be a huge hit with lots of demand!

This book is well written throughout. I don't know that horror comedy is an acurate description though. It's amusing and entertaining but not really funny. And the imagery is dark but doesn't really inspire fear, so not horror. It's more of a dark queer fantasy title.

What a strange and interesting read! Very entertaining. Very witty.

A mash of the past and present. Surrounding a book. A curse or something more sinister?

I enjoyed reading the chapters that were set in the past. Just something about it caught my interest a bit more than the chapters set in the present. I think it was the combination of the era it was presented in and the added myth surrounding Brookhants. Is it bad that I wanted to visit a place like that? Yes I’m a weirdo. At times the book seemed to lag in some places and I struggled to get past them. The characters from the present chapters were pretty good. I did like Harper right away. Merritt and Audrey took some time but I eventually came around. The whole book has a creepy vibe which I was digging. I do feel like having a book within a book was a huge task and due to that fact, the book was a bit too long.

As a whole, this is an okay read. I wanted to like it more than I did. I felt let down in a way. You’re expecting something big to happen and kind of give you closure and it didn’t happen. I didn’t get any horror vibes from this book. More suspense. This is a long read. It didn’t bother me too much but some parts I felt could have been left out. The cover is beautiful. I loved that it had a diverse group of LGBT characters. I give this 3.5 stars rounded up to 4 stars.

Plain Bad Heroines is wonderfully gothic and sapphic. There are two timelines which are woven together nicely. We follow characters in the present day and back in 1902. This story is about the creepy Bookhants boarding school and the curse attatched to it. In the present day, a horror film is being made about this curse. There is some unexplained magic and ambiguity throughout the novel which I normally don’t love, but I enjoyed this story enough that I didn’t mind. If you want a spooky, gay, smart story then this is for you. Don’t let the length and footnotes intimidate you. This is a perfect fall time read. *ARC provided by NetGalley for review.

A movie filmed at Brookhants, a years-abandoned and maybe-haunted girls' school, sets the stage for complex relationships between several young women in the school's past and the film's present. Audrey, the least experienced actress on the film set, is clued in that there's some gaslighting going on--the better to keep all the performers spooked. But Audrey is increasingly unable to tell truth from lies, and the production is disrupted in ways that seem beyond the scope of any faked haunting. Romance and jealousies are played out against a backdrop of foggy nights, lush foliage, tragic obsessions, and buzzing bees. Most enjoyable.

This is one of the most unique books I have ever read, set in two timelines, the early 1900's and present day. The author transitions between time periods and story lines expertly, and pulls both together well. There is good character development. It has a narrative writing style, that is
unusual, but I found that I enjoyed it. Most of the characters in both time lines are female, and the book explores the attractions and love stories between them. The horror is subtle and pervasive, and follows both sets of characters in both time lines. I did receive a copy of the book from the publisher/Netgalley, and I am glad I did. I spent much time reading this outside, and it seemed yellow jackets were always buzzing close by, as if they knew what I was reading. If you read the book, you will never view yellow jackets in quite the same way!

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily Danforth is being described as a sapphic romance and a metafictional horror. Where it is heavy on the sapphic romance, it is no where near a horror story.  Yes, there are deaths and curses but there is nothing that elicits horror, spookiness, or fear in any way. Perhaps this is because the writing style is narrator based, third person omniscient point of view, where you are told the story, versus a first or second person point of view, so you don't feel as though you are experiencing the story.

Emily Danforth's choice in writing style is challenging to follow. She tells you this dual, dare I say triple, timeline story by jumping not only between characters and time but also between footnotes and the narrator, or in this case, author's, own thoughts on the story. This slows the pacing of the book down to a crawl because at times you need to reread passages to fully understand when and where and sometimes of whom she is talking. She also uses the footnotes for random thoughts and not to develop the story. Accessing the footnotes on the ebook was not any easy task and doesn't format well.

The book has a large amount of pages and is definitely a slow read. I was bored and almost gave up reading the story until I was about 40% into it. Then I finally was accustomed to the writing style and could start to enjoy the plot, which had great potential but fell flat.

I liked how Emily Danforth incorporated a story from the past and intertwined it with a story from the present. There were opportunities to elicit scares and horror to this story but as soon as you started to feel like something strange was happening, the narrator interjected and the mood was lost. I think that this could have been written as two stories in a series instead of one large book. The first book could have been about the start of the Plain Bad Heroines Club and the curse. The second could have been about Merritt, Audrey, and Harper filming the movie about the curse. 

I really wanted to love this book. Unfortunately with the writing style and the anticlimatic ending to the story, it was only mediocre for me. I saw potential for this to be a great story but it still needs some tweaking.

I'm giving it 2.5 stars which I am rounding up to 3 only because it has potential and there may be others who like the story despite the writing style.

Thanks to Netgalley, William Morrow, and the Scene of the Crime Early Reads for the advanced copy of the book. The opinions are my own.

Brookhants School for Girls is cursed. Or is it? As a group of young women endeavors, with the help of a famous horror director, to tell the story of two tragic heroines of the Brookhants School, they find themselves more deeply entrenched in the creepy mythos than they could have possibly imagined. This wonderfully spooky, wonderfully queer, wonderfully meta novel by Emily Danforth is a joy to read. Emily Danforth manages to take a story about the shooting of a hollywood blockbuster and twist it to create characters across two centuries and from the United States to France to fall in love with. Our heroines are not delicate beauties or perfect ladies. Our heroines are strong, funny, interesting, flawed, and most importantly real women with all of the nuance that entails. In other words, they are plain, bad heroines.

Opening line: “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.”

The Miseducation of Cameron Post has been on my TBR for some time. It think it’s time to pull it up to the top. After reading Plain Bad Heroines, it has become clear to me thatEmily Danforth has a way with words and characters and I’m not quite ready to be done with yet. I need more. We need more dangerous books.

Lovely illustrations too.

I’ll let Ms. Danforth try to sell you on the novel in her own words: “it’s a sapphic romance (or maybe more than one of those) bound up in a gothic novel that knows it’s a novel and wants you to remember that, too, dear reader. And while it makes use of footnotes, I can promise you that it doesn’t store it’s lesbians there.”

If yours looking for a darkly gothic and exciting ride, Plain Bad Heroines will take you where you want to go.

Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishers for approving my request for a review copy of this book!

DNF at 42%. I really really acted to love this but I just found it terribly boring. Almost halfway in and nothing interesting happened. I do think a lot of people will enjoy this I am just not one of them. I like how it’s told in multiple timelines but none of them felt very gothic to me. The only character I sort of liked is Harper Harper. Maybe if I liked the others more I would have been compelled to finish. I may give this another try in the future but also maybe not.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free arc in exchange for an honest review!

A creepy story so sweet that it leans into rot, like fallen apples bursting in the sun.

Memorable, complicated characters and a truly terrifying setting make this one that will stick with you.

A wonderfully engaging book with multiple stories and timelines that parallel, diverge, intertwine, correlate and separate in ways that will make this a title to be enjoyed over and over. There is a lot going on in this book and it is not for those who want a simple, straightforward story. With magic, movies, Mary MacLane and many, many, many queer characters this title hit a lot of my genre hot spots. This book is full of LGBTQ+ characters who do not feel like stereotypes in the least. Each character has their own personality and flaws outside of their sexuality, the only clichés are brought about by the time period in which it is set (impossible to avoid) and not as a result of bad writing or narrative shortcuts. As for negatives, I can see how some might find the narrator off-putting, though as a fan of gothic type novels it didn't lessen my love for the book, and in e-book format the endnotes were frustrating to navigate (not sure if this will be fixed for the official edition). Overall, a story that takes a lot from what has been done previously while still feeling very original in the final output.

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ARC in exchange for honest review

This book has been defined as a sapphic dark academia story and a metafictional horror and I think that both descriptions are pretty accurate.
It's a phenomenal novel developed in two main time lines: it begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls where the students are obsessed with the memoirs of the writer Mary Mac Lane (this part reminded me of Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer, another dark academia themed novel) and they establish The Plain Bad Heroine Society. One day, both girls find their deaths at the place of their meetings, and since then, the institution is believed to be haunted and cursed.
The second time line takes place in the present day, when a horror film adaptation of a book about Brookhants and its stories is starting to take form. This project brings three young women together and the mystery sorrounding Brookhants, back to life.

I really enjoyed the book and the idea is perfectly executed. I found it a little bit slow at times but I believe that it has all the components to become a cult book (maybe even to be adapted to a movie?) not only because of the theme but also because of the rarefied atmosphere that makes it extremely appealing for the fans of the genre.
I read it as an ebook but I'm pretty sure that the experience would have been much more gratifying with a printed copy.
My favorites fragments of the book were those set in 1902 in which the author even uses a more complex and sophisticated language, according to the literary style of the time.

It has beautiful illustrations and the potential to build a literary fandom.

Plain Bad Heroines is a good horror story and also very funny.. I tore through it, It's a really fun read!

This book is a mix of gothic horror and modern haunting, all connected to a manor on the Rhode Island coast. I really enjoyed the intermingled narratives and the various jumps through time. The setting and its creepy occurrences felt very real, and I loved unearthing more and more of the tale of the land and its curse(s). I also liked the characters and the various ways in which they dealt with the legacies of their own rich backstories. I also love footnotes, so that was a plus. The author's tone mixes anachronism ("Readers") and modern slang in a way that I found to be very engaging.

All in all, though, this book felt a bit unfinished. The ending is somewhat abrupt, the symbolism is mixed, and the character motivations are sometimes idiosyncratic. It feels like there's just too much going on overall. I was longing for it to gel together just a bit more.

3.5/5, rounded up for NetGalley's rating system

(Dear NetGalley/HarperCollins, I did wish for a Kindle version to make this easier to read!)

This was an interesting book. It’s stories within stories. It’s a horror novel but the mixing in of present day Hollywood makes it so different. It’s also intriguing how characters sexuality were handled in two different eras. It seems as if it’s two stories at times but they are equally fascinating. The plot keeps you guessing and it’s not confusing at all. I couldn’t put this book down. If you are in the mood for a book with horror tendencies I highly recommend Plain Bad Heroines.

girls, a movie set, a haunted school and a dual timeline? Sign me up, sister. I actually DNF'd Miseducation of Cameron Post, but emily m. danforth's Plain Bad Heroines seemed right up my ally so I powered through all 600+ pages.

The back cover of my ARC bills it at "The Favourite meets the Haunting of Hill house"


This is a complicated story to explain, even after having read the whole thing, so bear with me. There's Brookhants, a Rhode Island school for girls that is reportedly haunted after several creepy happenings there in the early 1900s. The headmistress, Libbie, and her live-in lover and teacher, Alex, are the main pivot points of that story, and the girls of the school are obsessed with the book by Mary Maclean. Oh, and there are suspicious deaths, obviously. Then we have the present day--2014/15ish--where Merritt Emmons has penned a book about Brookhants that is being made into a movie starring Harper Harper and Audrey Wells--and that film quickly begins experiencing weird things--but what's true, what's for the film, and who can they trust?

While there is a plot here, there's just a lot of interconnected stories and reveals that kind of drive this forward. I loved the use of footnotes--just the right amount in my view--and the weird third person narration and the characters were interesting and I liked the setting a lot. The book was reallllly loong and it definitely won't be for everyone, but I was intrigued. I enjoyed it. I'll recommend it to people looking for a spooky read--but it's spooky in a fun way not like a "nightmare" way and there's a lot of humor and jest in it too, which is nice. Also, it's super super queer so it'll definitely be on ALLLL those year-end lists.

PLAIN BAD HEROINES is a combination of horror, historical fiction, romance, and wry metafiction, and while that may sound like quite the endeavor, Danforth makes it look easy. I thought that the two narratives, the past narrative and the present one, combined well and wove together to tell a well drawn out Gothic tale of terror with a lot of heart. It never feels like it loses the plot in spite of how complex it is, and the added bonus of a cheeky narrator with various citations and side comments makes it all the more fun to read. I was worried that the horror moments would get lost in the cheek and the romance aspects, but Danforth creates some really suspenseful moments and some serious body horror... usually involving yellow jackets. Which is YIKES in the best ways possible. But it's really the characters that kept me totally enthralled with this story. The past characters of Libbie and Alex were interesting enough, their doomed romance a foregone conclusion due to the facts of the present storyline and also the constraints of women during the Gilded Age, especially if they were queer. But it was the trio of Merritt, Harper, and Audrey that really charmed me, as their dynamics, complexities, and charm worked so well. I especially appreciated Audrey and her desperation to escape her old life, in hopes of finding success away from her somewhat toxic mother.

PLAIN BAD HEROINES is a complex and sweeping read that is just in time for the Halloween season. But those who are wary of horror will probably be able to handle it as well. Danforth has blown me away once again.