I'd been in a bit of a book slump lately and needed something to draw me in. This really did the trick. I was pulled in by the setting of a girls' boarding school of the coast of Scotland. New hire, Rose, is kept in the dark about everything. She is attempting to teach Classics to girls that show very little interest in the material. And what happened to her predecessor? I enjoyed the women from Greek mythology that were presented and saw how they functioned as part of this story. The slow build of what was actually happening at the school and how Rose would handle it made me keep reading.

This book is great! Would definitely recommend. Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I will not be giving feedback on this book. I started it, and was not in the right mindset for reading it. When/if I do pick it up again, I will definitely leave a thoughtful review.

I was so excited to read Madam because the cover gives you creepy, gothic vibes and I was so intrigued by the boarding school premise. Unfortunately, it was a struggle and I couldn't get into it. I eventually ended up not finishing it. Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Just okay. I wasn’t invested in the characters or plot and probably should have set it aside. This one just wasn’t for me

A riveting, modern gothic debut with shades of 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒆𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒕 𝑯𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚, 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒕𝒆𝒑𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒅 𝑾𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒔 and a dash of 𝑪𝒊𝒓𝒄𝒆, set at a secretive all girls’ boarding school perched on a craggy Scottish peninsula.

𝑴𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔:

Dark and menacing, Phoebe Wynne’s modern gothic novel weaves together themes of patriarchy, feminism, class and education.

Nothing is as it seems at Caldonbrae Hall. Rose Christie, a 26-year-old Classics teacher, uncovers the darkness beating at the heart of the elite boarding school. Not only does Wynne write beautifully, she creates a chilling, haunting atmosphere and, after a slow beginning I couldn’t put the book down.

𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒘𝒂𝒏𝒕 𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒔𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆…
𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒚 𝒘𝒂𝒏𝒕 𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒐𝒃𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆…
𝑳𝒆𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒎 𝒔𝒆𝒆 𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒇𝒊𝒓𝒆 𝒃𝒖𝒓𝒏

A huge thank you to @NetGalley and @StMartinsPress for a DRC of 𝑴𝒂𝒅𝒂𝒎 by Phoebe Wynne.

I tried to like this one, I really did. The synopsis grabbed me right away - sadly, the book did not. It was like trudging through molasses and it got to the point where I no longer cared to finish the book. I hate doing that, but I have over 2,000 books on my TBR list so if a book can't hold my attention, it's tough to stick it out. I do wish the author the best of luck, though.

Mamma mia where do I begin.

Despite having a deliciously enticing premise, Madam fails on just about every level. Set at the fictional Scottish all girls’ boarding school Caldonbrae Hall, Madam introduces Rose, a bright young ingenue of a teacher who gets a job as the head of Caldonbrae’s Classics department — notably and oddly, she’s the school’s first outside hire in over a decade. She arrives at Caldonbrae and quickly discerns that there is fuckery afoot.

The entire function of Rose’s character is to unearth the fuckery. There is so little interiority to her character that there is never a sense that she is a real person living this experience; she is transparently a thriller protagonist bumbling around chasing clues, and she does an agonizingly terrible job at it. Every time a character starts to reveal something and then realizes they’ve said too much, Rose lets it go — quite the impressive regard for boundaries, given the fact that when she isn’t walking away from people mid-conversation, she’s asking everyone and their mother impertinent questions that go nowhere. This is, quite literally, the entire book. The fuckery is, of course, eventually unearthed, and yes, it was indeed the most obvious explanation that you guessed by page 50, but anyway, what happens at this point in the book? Rose actually takes the fate of her students into her own hands? She allies with someone to bring about systemic change? She realizes resistance is futile and makes a plan to get the hell out of Dodge? No, she basically just… asks more questions. More specific questions, this time around, to be fair to her.

Anyway, I mentioned briefly that Rose is a Classics teacher, so let’s go back to that. Having been raised by a second-wave feminist, Rose has internalized a lot of her mother’s values (she wouldn’t go as far as to call herself a feminist though, heaven forfend! Sidebar: I’m not sure that in 2021 we still need novels that spoon-feed feminist ideology to the reader by adding a spoonful of sugar to the medicine, holding our hand and reassuring us that “women are people too” isn’t a radical, scary notion, but… Phoebe Wynne disagrees, I guess). Anyway, Rose is drawn to female characters and historical figures from Greek and Roman mythology and history, and spotlights a handful of them — Antigone, Dido, Medea, Lucretia, et al. — in her classes. The integration of classics into this novel is so ham-fisted, so unsubtle, so unnecessary, it bears asking why it had to be the classics at all. The Secret History (a very different project with very different aims that I am not attempting to compare to Madam on a deeper level, to be clear) would not be The Secret History if it were about a group of chemical engineering students — the classics are so integral to that novel’s themes and framework that it would crumble without that element. If We Were Villains would not be If We Were Villains if the students were studying Jane Austen instead of Shakespeare. This isn’t a criticism; it shows how deliberately constructed those novels are. In Madam, the classics are merely an arbitrary addition that could have been substituted with impactful women from any period of literature or history and netted the exact same result: a half-baked commentary on how History Has Not Been Kind To Women.

Aside from being thematically careless, this book was just poorly written on a sentence-by-sentence level. Inexplicably, most scenes are recounted in the pluperfect tense:

“Earlier that morning she’d knotted her unruly hair into a thick plait[…]”

“Rose had gazed at the delightful picture they all made, touching her own blazer with a tinge of shame.”

“She’d stopped by Anthony’s office on Friday to see if he wanted to go for a walk together over the weekend.”

Why? Why are we being narrated scenes that already happened rather than just… being shown those scenes? The whole thing takes on a very tell-don’t-show style, which I believe can work in certain circumstances, but this ain’t it. Also, the details in this book are all in the wrong places. It’s set at a boarding school, and the school itself is barely described — we are usually up to date on the state of Rose’s hair, though. I also think it should be a cardinal sin for a book to start with a journey (in this case: Rose on the train to Caldonbrae), end the chapter when they arrive, and start the following chapter the next morning. We don’t see Rose settling into her flat, we don’t see her walking around the school, we don’t see any of it. The exposition is just terrible. Characters are also introduced at such a lightning speed that I couldn’t keep track of who anyone was and I had no sense of how many students or teachers were at this school.

Changing gears now: as other reviewers have noted, the white saviorism and the tokenistic portrayal of a group of Japanese students is downright shameful. Diversity does not need to serve a narrative function, and indeed, it’s often better when it does not, especially in the hands of a white author writing about non-white characters. Here, the function is both extant and obvious: it’s to illustrate by comparison how progressive Rose is. And I quote:

“The general spread of white faces made Rose uncomfortable despite the small handful of Asian girls, who seemed to group together. This lack of diversity leaked across the staff, too — not at all appropriate or modern for the nineties, she thought.”

Speaking of diversity and representation, I’m not sure why some people are calling this book queer? It’s not. There is one (1) lesbian character, not the protagonist, and she’s a self-loathing alcoholic, so… not sure why that’s something to celebrate, but whatever.

Anyway, back to the above quote, gross depiction of Japanese students aside — this book is set in the 1990s. That sweet spot for dark academia novels, where authors have the convenience of writing virtually about the present-day, but where the characters don’t have cell phones and laptops which would destroy both the atmosphere and undermine the characters’ work at solving the mystery. That’s all fine and well, but if you take out all the references to Queen and Batman Begins, this book feels like something out of the 1800s. You will hear no disputes from me about the fact that misogyny is alive and well and that certain individuals and institutions hold antiquated values, but those conservative values are satirized to such an extreme here that they start to feel utterly absurd. And the problem is that this book is not trying to be satire. I’m supposed to take it at face value, even when it’s pushing my suspension of disbelief further and further past its breaking point.

Which brings us to The Fuckery. As discussed, I found it very obvious, but that is honestly the least of my damn concerns. The details here were just… so, so ridiculous, trying so hard to be provocative. The “Worship” scene (if you know you know) is the most unintentionally funny thing I have read in my entire life. This was supposed to be a horrifying scene and I just couldn’t stop laughing at the fact that someone actually greenlit this garbage. I could practically see Phoebe Wynne rubbing her hands together in glee for having shocked the reader with something so DARING and TABOO when it actually just served to undermine the impact of whatever psychological abuse was going on here by turning the whole thing into a dark, fucked up cartoonish pantomime.

This was just an incoherent, poorly-constructed project that had no ardor, no artistic integrity, and no intrigue. It was bizarrely terrible and did not have a single redeeming quality and it made me feel cynical about my profession (I’m an editor) and if you take anything from this review let it be this: read literally any other book! Please! I don’t care how good the summary is! I suffered so you don’t have to!!!

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review.

This was a weird, uneven book, with an insipid heroine. I think that the basic bones of the plot were really interesting and could have been handled a lot better in the hands of a more competent writer. There was little to no atmosphere and the inclusion of classics should have been a lot cooler than it ended up being. There is also this really bizarre tick to the writing where the author would flashback to pivotal scenes after they happened rather than just narrating them normally, which would drain the tension out of a lot of scenes.

I think the book succeeds in being very engrossing and claustrophobic; it really makes you feel as trapped as the main character is. I just wish said main character had been more interesting or believable, and that things had been a bit more subtle rather than trying to constantly shock the reader. The book is also really weird with the way people of color are portrayed; their inclusion seems to be solely so that the white protagonist can pat herself on the back for how much more woke she is than her peers.

I will say, something I thought was done really well was the main character's interactions with her students; I think the teens were written very realistically! The classroom conversations, though sometimes repetitive, felt very much like an actual high school classroom.

Overall I found this kind of underwhelming, but I did enjoy the ending a lot.

Rose Christie is a young feminist who accepts a position as a teacher at a prestigious boarding school for the elite in Scotland. It is atmospherically set against the backdrop of creepy gothic school where her students give her many struggles and little respect.
She must find her own self, remain true to her feminist beliefs and push on. I feel the characters could have been developed a bit further, but overall enjoyed the thematic of this book and that old gothic feeling for which the author nailed.

This book has some twists at the end which won’t disappoint.

Thank you to the publisher St. martin’s Press and NetGalley for the advanced digital copy of this book for a review.

This was a typical thriller for me. Very ordinary plot and writing. I would have to do a reread to really see how I feel about the story as a whole later on

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an ARC of this book.

Unfortunately I did not love this book. I was invited to read it, and I probably was not really the right audience for it. I love a good gothic novel, and I have loved books like The Handmaid's Tale, which this is being compared to, but this book tried to be horror when it really wasn't at all. The Handmaid's Tale had genuinely horrible things in it...the main characters in this book reacted to things like they were horrible when really they were just weird. So much of it was far-fetched and eye-roll worthy. Like...if you really owned a school like this with very specific and antiquated beliefs and you needed to hire a new teacher, you would search for like-minded people, tell them what's up, and go from there. You would not force and threaten the most feminist teacher ever to exist to accept your weird beliefs. It just never made sense.

I did like the Greek mythology parts of this book, and some of the storyline I enjoyed. For some reason even though I overall disliked it, I always felt like I wanted to keep reading, wanted to see what would happen. Maybe the writing was good, maybe it's just that I kept expecting something to live up to the "horror" tags that never did.

This book was entirely too long and not at all believable. It also tried to be horror when really nothing horrible happened at all. While the writing was strong, I overall just kept asking myself what is the point. I'm sorry to the publisher that reached out to me to read this because I don't think I was the audience you were aiming at for a favorable review.

I have taken a long time after finishing this book to start this review because I loved it so much and pretty well anything I could say about it is a spoiler. A large part of the fun of this story is experiencing it just like Rose does, which means totally in the dark with little pieces slowly revealed until the final whole of the horror is exposed. I recommend not reading anything about it and going in blind. This was my experience, and it was ghastly fun to try to figure out what was going on. I won’t spoil even a single element for you!

The huge, secluded boarding school setting screams gothic with ghosts or some other facet of the supernatural. The folks in the nearby town shun the school and its staff and don’t want to talk about what goes on there which suggests maybe a cult of some sort. I kept guessing and getting it wrong. What takes place there is more monstrous and terrible than anything I had imagined. It is one part “The Handmaids Tale” mixed with more than a dash of Louise O'Neill’s “Only Ever Yours” combined into a feminist’s worst nightmare.

That is all the information you will get from me! If you have ever yelled at your TV cheering on Offred and the other Handmaids, or if you have proudly worn an “Ask me About my Feminist Agenda” t-shirt or protested in a pink pussy hat then I think you will be pleased with watching these young women quite literally burn down the patriarchy. It is an dark and frequently infuriating story, but it left me feeling militantly motivated to fight the patriarchy in my own small ways. Attend a march, sign a petition, burn buildings to the ground. Well, maybe not that last one, but definitely the other two!

Thank you to St. Martin's Press for providing an Electronic Advance Reader Copy via NetGalley for review.

The parts where it focused on her classics background and history really pulls the reader out of the story, but not in a good way. I found I could not keep interested and did not finish this book.

DNF
This book just isn't working for me at all. The pace is way too slow, the main character is unlikable and childish. I'm opting to give up and not post a review.

The cover gives you some creepy, gothic vibes right off the bat. That dark cliffside by the sea? It just screams haunting, cold, and eerie.

Rose Christie is about to embark on a new journey. She's been hired to teach at the elite Caldonbrae Hall, a girls-only boarding school of renowned esteem. She's nervous but excited, this is a huge step for her in her career and of course, the financial stability will be a major boon. When Rose arrives she finds herself immersed in a place full of secrecy and tradition. She's still in a probationary period so she's being kept on the edge of information, only given bits and pieces that are totally necessary to her functioning as a teacher.

Things seem a bit off to Rose right from the start. She can't leave the schoolgrounds for one. Even girls all seem to know more than she does, hinting at the real goings-on at the school but never letting her fully in on the knowledge.

Plus there's the teacher she's replacing who almost seems to have disappeared without a trace, a student who is shadowing her, threatening letters, and rather antiquated ideas about gender equality. Rose isn't too sure she's fit for a place like this. But, they're caring for her mother, a woman suffering from advanced MS, she's torn.

As more and more secrets are uncovered you'll find yourself uneasy with the revelations and implications and flipping through the pages faster and faster to uncover all the sordid details.

For me, it was a bit of a slow build-up, but about halfway through I was fully invested and couldn't look away from the story.

So many mixed reviews on this - lots of uncomfortable readers and some DNF's. To be honest, I was approved on NetGalley quite some time ago, started it and put it down. Not because it was bad, I just wasn't in the mood for this type of book. When I saw the hardcover at the library, I grabbed it. I've been reading a lot of light fiction and wanted to switch it up. WELL, this is DEF different from my recent beach reads. 

Rose Christie, a twenty-something modern woman, takes on a new teaching job as a Classics teacher at Caldonbrae Hall, an extremely traditional (and elite) private school set atop the Scottish Cliffs. Rose is excited to educate the girls of the future, but quickly finds out that the school and its mission are hauntingly different than what she expected. 

This book IS in fact uncomfortable. It is NOT a fast paced thriller. It is CREEPY #af. I think that was the point! This book was written so well. It was exactly what I was looking for. I loved Rose and her naivety. I admired her courage to stand up against hundreds of years of nasty tradition. The small tidbits of classic history surrounding women was really fascinating and I enjoyed seeing the tie into her lessons. There is something so appealing about gothic academia.

Madam by Phoebe Wynne seemed right up my alley. If Jane Eyre and Rebecca had a baby, it could have potentially been this book. And for approximately 80% of the book I was enjoying what I was reading.

The book begins with Rose Christie being hired to work at prestigious, secretive Caldonbrae Hall as the new Classics teacher. The previous teacher, Jane, has left her post under mysterious circumstances. Caldonbrae had never before had to recruit a teacher from "the outside" before and this is what will create a major source of tension between Rose and the rest of the school.

As she begins her posting, there are a number of things that don't quite add up and no one seems to want to provide Rose with any of the answers she is needing. The students don't seem to be interested in learning, the teachers have mysterious assignments that she can't be privy to, and there are strange happenings with the Upper Sixth students.

As the school year progresses, the sense of menace grows. Rose cannot seem to fit in with the other teachers and she also cannot seem to reconcile the antiquated principles of the school (the story takes place in the 1990s, but often felt like it was taking place in the 1900s based on the uniforms of the students, the way everyone but Rose spoke, and the education the girls were getting at the school.)

Eventually Rose figures out exactly what is going on at the school and that's when the book really went downhill for me. There were parts of the story that left me feeling icky and uncomfortable...and not in the good way that books that often challenge your thoughts and feelings can. If it hadn't been for the fact that I was almost finished with the book and just wanted to push through, I would have put down the book and not finished it.

Unfortunately, I was not able to finish this book. The synopsis was right up my alley, dark academia, but it fell short. I found Rose to be incorrigible and didn't enjoy any of the other characters. Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC!

This tried really hard, but I can't see a path in which this set up works as well as it needs to. The central premise of a new woman joining the teaching staff of a very insular school could have gone so many ways, but this particular woman doesn't make any sense at all. Their choice makes it so impossible to believe the rest of the plot.

I did love the horror/idea of this school existing and the stories of mythological women mixed in, but generally wanted something more than what was clearly going to happen the entire time.