Rose Christie starts a new job at a prestigious boarding school for girls in the wilds of Scotland. Taking girls from the upper echelons of society Rose tries to teach them classics but the girls seem more than usually casual about their education. Rose smells something rotten and those around her aren’t forthcoming with any information they just want her to take the money and get in with it.
Madam is goth St Trinians but less fun. It’s set in the early 90s and this is probably the latest it could be set because the premise of the book relies upon the isolation of the school and the girls themselves. Even the locals know all is not well with the school so it’s difficult to believe the girls wouldn’t know about the wider world considering they go home for holidays etc.
The use of classics stories to reflect and inspire the girls to take control was nicely done and made me look at the stories of Medusa and Medea in a different light.

This debut novel has been compared to some giants of literature: Jane Eyre, The Secret History, Rebecca, The Handmaid's Tale. Unfortunately it bears no resemblence to any of these or only in the most superficial of ways.

26 year old Rose Christie has been offered the post of head of the Classics department at a prestigious girls' boarding school in the north of Scotland. She is worried about being up to the job (rightly - her teaching methods are pretty awful and she is unable to command respect from either the girls or the teachers) but soon she has more to worry about. What is the purpose of the school? What happened to her predecessor Jane and why does student Bethany plague her?

I wanted to love this book but I couldn't get into it at all. The premise was essentially unbelievable. Conveniently it is set in 1992 before the advent of mobile phones and broadband so Rose finds herself unable to contact the outside world apart from a couple of botched phone calls. She witnesses something which is at best unethical and then does nothing about it. She purports to care about her mother but neglects to phone her, forgets her birthday and then... well I won't insert a spoiler here. But really? As Rose is a Classics teacher we get chunks of Greek and Latin stories about the likes of Medusa shovelled into the story. Compare this to the wonderful use of Greek and Roman myths in The Secret History where they are an integral part of the story. Add to this a couple of bizarre point of view changes and a few odd descriptions (cheekbones so high that eyes disappear? I mean, we all want high cheekbones but that's a hell of a price to pay!) and very soon the reader starts to despair.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I have literally just finished this book and I am exhausted! From the general intensity of the situations, the landscape, the complete outrage and a little frustration with the main character at times. My emotions, blood pressure and sense of morality have been squeezed, questioned and pushed to the edge with this one.

Caldonbrae Hall Girl’s school has been an educational institution of irrepressible power and prestige for 150 years. Rose just got a job offer there from out of the blue as the new classics teacher (the previous one having been dismissed in mysterious circumstances). Even with reservation’s she takes the positon at the isolated Scottish castle and soon she finds herself lunging from one uncomfortable situation to another. The girls are rude and seemingly uninterested in learning anything she has to teach, the staff are secretive and the locals show nothing but distrust of anyone from Caldonbrae. It soon becomes clear that Rose will need follow the example of her fearless Greek and Roman heroines to protect everything she holds dear. The dark secret that is at the heart of Caldonbrae threatens to engulf her, she must find a way to escape and save as many of the girls she has come to care about as she can….but can it be done?

I liked Rose and felt for her in the hopeless situation she found herself in, although she was a little frustrating to say the least. Her reactions seemed to make a bad situation worse all the time and all I wanted to do was shake her and tell her to think! Just think and be a bit cleverer to get some results. The story was very well written, with an intensity that riled my fury and disgust in equal measure (it was supposed to). As well as being a great dark and brooding yarn, with some really lovely emotional moments, it made me question my own views on the world and how certain sexes and classes operate within its balance of power.

I found this book to be real page-turner, and read it over the course of a weekend. At first I was concerned that the story was a little too influenced by Daphne du Maurier - the cliff-top mansion and the mysterious predecessor are very reminiscent of 'Rebecca'. Nevertheless, I thought it really began to come into its own as it progressed, developing a really effective sense of entrapment and rage.

All the ingredients of a classic Gothic novel are here, and some are just a little too trite. The woman in the basement (and you just know there had to be one) is a bit of a thrown-away revelation, and the minute the secret passage is mentioned, it's clear that it's integral to the plot. That said, the aims and intentions of the school are truly sinister, and the vulnerability of the girls is heart-wrenching. I was also intrigued by the author's choice to set the novel in the early 1990s, which not only means that the characters have no access to mobile phones or the internet, but also that parallels can be drawn between the plight of the girls and that of Princess Diana; something I found genuinely interesting. And the use of classical references is wonderful: as a non-classicist, I learned a lot, and I loved the clever way in which the stories of monstrous women tied into the plot.

Overall, this is an excellent first novel, and I look forward to reading more books by Phoebe Wynne in the future. I would definitely set this for a course on contemporary Gothic or women's writing: it's sensationalist in just the right way

When I think boarding school I thik of malory towers or somethign Enid Blytonesque. This is the inverted version of a sweet school story, and its brilliant.

When Rose gets offered the opportunity to work at a prestigious boarding school in Scotland she thinks it will be a great career move. With her mom being unwell she can help get her the best care she needs with the increased salary too. However things at Caldonbrae Hall arent quite what she expected.

The longer Rose stays the more she learns and the less happy she fells about what happens at the school. The values are a little archaic and some of the girls dont seem as happy as shes told they are. The school is far reaching and Rose learns that her predessor also tried to help one of the girls, which got her nowhere and now Rose is trapped.

It would have been interesting to learn a little more about some of the girls, especially some of the more main characters but as we erad through Janes eyes the unknowns were part of the story and I loved it.

Setting this book in 1992 gave the author a convenient way of controlling her protagonist. The absence of mobile phones and widespread internet would have wiped out most of Rose's problems and made the book a lot shorter. I wouldn't have minded if almost ANYTHING about that era other than the absence of communications had been present in the book,

The book starts promisingly, but despite the author's best efforts to build suspense, the secret that's eventually revealed didn't strike me as that big a deal. Swiss finishing schools did 90% of what the school in the book did - who knows, maybe even the dodgy bits, And talking of those 'dodgy bits', introducing two mildly racy scenes may well have been a mistake - either go the whole hog and increase the smut or violence factor or leave it out completely. It doesn't bother me, but a lot of reviewers (especially Americans) seem to be easily offended by the odd swear word and any naughty bits at all.

Whilst we're at it, I wasn't that impressed by the attempts to shoe-horn lots of tales of the classics into the book. Had they been more seamlessly included, I'd probably have gone for it. Instead, I found that after Dido, I pretty much skipped the short chapters about women from Greek and Latin (mostly) tragedies.

There are quite a lot of inconsistencies. Rose seemed too young to be a head of department at 26. Her mother seemed too old to have such a young daughter. Debutantes stopped being presented to the queen in the 1960s but not in the weird world of this school. I didn't 'buy' the idea that well-to-do Japanese parents would send their daughters to Scotland to be taught to do things entirely outside their class by people who probably didn't know how to do them anyway.

The biggest question I'm left with is WHY? Why would the headmaster want to recruit Rose only to change her? Why would it matter if the school had a head of classics or not? Why would he care if she stayed or went? I was expecting some 'history' between him and one of her parents to explain why he'd go to the bother of bringing her into the school.

There's lots of potential to deliver something really interesting and to build significant tension and intrigue, but this reads rather more like Mallory Towers boosted with thin dose of scandal.

This starts well, gothic style mystery with a naive young classics teacher going to work in a mysterious, isolated elite girls boarding school. However as the mystery unravelled I just found it more and more unbelievable, I know the reader always wants to shout at the heroine to flee but in this case it was more disbelief that the heroine could be so stupid. Not a bad read but not something I would rush to buy.

After a lot of advance praise for this book I was so looking forward to reading Phoebe Wynne's debut. It has been described as a feminist gothic novel and compared to the Secret History - all the things I love. After the departure of a classics teacher from Caldonbrae Hall, a Scottish girls boarding school, Rose Christie becomes the first new teacher at the school for more than a decade and feels unwelcome from the start.
I was so disappointed with this novel, unfortunately I found it unbelievable and lacking in characterisation and atmosphere. I feel that I read a different novel to the highly praised, gothic feminist suspense novel that has been reviewed by others. I would recommend others give this a try but sadly it wasn't for me.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a digital ARC

I DEVOURED this book. Absolutely fantastic and one of the best books I’ve read. Dark, twisted and so clever. It’s as if The Handmaid’s Tale met My Dark Vanessa and it’s just brilliant. Absolutely, heart-racing, edge of your seat reading,

This book is great fun set firmly in the gothic tradition and with some clever subversive ideas that never quite comes to the cataclysmic ending I was hoping for.

The elements are all there - the sinister boarding school where an innocent young teacher arrives and finds herself at cross-purposes with the Head and the Governors, the remote Scottish setting and gloomy buildings and variously complicit members of staff, the dependent Mother held as ransom against the heroine's actions.

The book sets itself up with hat tips to Jane Eyre, Rebecca and others, and the ideas are all there to play out nicely - the young teacher brought up by a feminist mother set against the rigours of the old establishment and determined to liberate her girls.

But although the tension builds and builds, the climax is somewhat disappointing and the conclusion seemed a bit weak compared to the heightened tensions and the threatened powers of the establishment.

Overall an entertaining read and a pleasure to read, would just have loved a more impactful ending.

Set on a remote Scottish peninsula Caldonbrae Hall is a strict private school for girls where they are punished and can be downgraded. We follow lily who is their first new teacher from outside for over 10 years. I found lily very likeable as we follow her journey finding out the secrets of Caldonbrae and how she becomes trapped there by the rules and the hold they have over her through her family. My only disappointment was the ending which seemed a bit of a let down I was routing for lily to bring the school down and make its transgressions public

An intriguing mystery that captivated me from the start!

The setting of Caldonbrae Hall was well crafted and I quickly wanted to know all the school’s secrets.

Sometimes I did wish that Rose knew more about the school’s purpose earlier on in the novel as it was sometimes frustrating to almost find out secrets and then not find out! However there was lots of twists and turns throughout.

I would recommend this book to any mystery fans! Thank you to NetGalley and the Quercus for an ARC of this book in exchange for a review.

Some interesting ideas, though derivative, but execution lacks finesse

Rigorous editing, particularly during the first part of the book would have stopped some of Wynne’s glaring basic errors.

The central character is called Rose. Rose is definitely called Rose because Wynne repeatedly tells us that Rose does this, Rose does that, even with no other person within view whom the reader might be confused into wondering about. I began to scream SHE, wondering if perhaps Wynne was afraid of those three little letters.

The central story seems influenced by some other, towering books – The Handmaid’s Tale, probably The Secret History, Jane Eyre - involves a young Classics teacher at a state school, inexplicably head hunted to teach classics at a very very elite and secretive girl’s school in the middle of nowhere-on-the-wild-coast of Scotland. WE know that there is something sinister and wrong about this, and even the oft mentioned Rose doesn’t quite understand why she – sorry – Rose – is the chosen one. Particularly as she is the first new teaching appointment for 10 years

Rose, sorry, she, I must have caught this habit – doesn’t initially at least, seem to be that good a teacher, given how her first lessons are shown. Curiously, her students, all from very very rich and influential families don’t even seem to be expected to be learning much,

What exactly the secrets are, become pretty obvious, pretty quickly. It’s fine for the reader to know more than the central character knows – as long as characters have enough depth and reality the reader can happily go along with the journey of knowledge and revelation which the innocent character must discover. The problem here, is that all is that characters are types, rather than three dimensional, believable. The best thrillers are those where tension increases slowly and incrementally, rather than a kind of unremitting full volume.

I did enjoy visiting or revisiting the stories of Ancient Greek mythology and history and some reinterpretation of tragic and raging women of myth and ancient history, such as Medea, Medusa, Boudicea, Agrippina, from a feminist viewpoint, hence 2 stars rather than 1.

2.5

In 1992 Rose Christie is employed at Calonbrae Hall, a boarding school in Scotland for girls of wealthy and influential families. She is to be the new Head of Classics, a step up the career ladder and a good promotion as she’s only in her mid twenties. She soon learns the school is not the place she thought or hoped it might be as they try to control her in various ways as they churn out girls more suited to the social ideas of the nineteenth century than the late twentieth.

I had high hopes of this book as the premise is promising but it soon begins to feel totally off kilter and not in a good way. It’s a boiling cauldron of weird, of ideas that are outmoded, of characters that are awful with little development that just feel like cardboard cutouts the girls are being trained to be. Every feminist bone in my body screams no at this book and there are a couple of instances that make me recoil in revulsion and horror though none of it has any semblance of authenticity. The book is set in the 1990’s not the 1890’s and it makes the whole thing too hard to accept. The dialogue is stilted, clunky, false and feels fake. I feel no suspense, little menace or threat as the blurb suggests and the only Gothic is the building. Th pace is slow, the plot is unbelievable, I want to scream at Rose and tell her to leave, right now and not look back. She does but way too late.

Stepford Daughters for wives? Nooooo. I suppose the fact the girls call female teachers Madam should have warned me as I once worked briefly in a school where that was the form of address. Trust me, hormonal teens can get an awful lot of meaning into the word! Shudder. I think it’s clear I did not enjoy this one at all although others may like it better than I do.

With thanks to NetGalley and apologies to Quercus and the author that I could not relate to the book. I received this as an arc in return for an honest review.

This book intrigued me based on the description as it felt that it would be right up my street. I wasn't wrong - it wasn't as good as handmaid's tale but similar. I would say it is positioned slightly younger and less political. However it explored the potential roles of women and traditional male expectations of the upper classes.

I needed to finish the book as wanted to see how it ended as I was invested in the key characters. The end felt a bit rushed though, so I was a bit disappointed. I couldn't understand how the basics like finances, identity worked etc it seemed to conflict with the rest of the story.

I was provided with an advance copy of the book by netgalley and the publishers in exchange for a fair and honest review which I have done.

A dark, gothic mystery with strong dystopian overtones. This was an atmospheric thriller with a protagonist who has a very satisfying character journey, from fairly timid to outspoken. Rose takes a job as a teacher at an elite girls’ boarding school in Scotland. In doing so she enters a different world with its own rules and punishments. This was strange and gripping, and definitely the most compelling novel in this setting I’ve read for a long time.

REVIEW - Madam by Phoebe Wynne
Madam is a debut novel and centres on Rose, a twenty-something Classics teacher who is headhunted for a position at Caldonbrae, an elite all-girl boarding school on the Scottish coast. She is the first new member of staff in many years. On arrival, it soon becomes clear that Rose is totally out of her depth and is overwhelmed by the demeanour of the girls in her classes, the mystery surrounding her predecessors departure and the intrusion of the school into her personal affairs.

The answers as to why something is amiss are always tantalisingly out of reach. I kept thinking of Sargeant Howie arriving on Summerisle in The Wicker Man. Everyone knows the terrible truth of the place but him. This is the situation Rose finds herself in. Eventually, after many uncomfortable and disorientating weeks, Rose is finally through her probation period and is finding her feet when Caldonbrae begins to give up its secrets and Rose learns what dark purpose lies behind its walls. Not wanting to spoil the plot, I think it’s safe to say that this unveiling appals Rose and culminates in a dramatic conclusion.

The narrative is interspersed with tales of women from Greek mythology and Roman history. At first I found this a bit disorientating as it took me out of the story - but I soon enjoyed reading these and felt I was learning along with the girls and being party to their feminist awakening. Their inclusion really makes sense of the conclusion of the book.

I enjoyed this book, and I’m still thinking about it days after finishing it. I initially felt somewhat conflicted about Rose and her actions. My own inclination in some of the situations she finds herself in would be very different as I’m not one for putting up with any nonsense, especially not from men. However, I’m sure we can all think we would do a certain thing but actually in the moment would be just as paralysed as Rose seems to be. I keep considering her position - she’s young, grieving and navigating a difficult relationship with her mother, and now she finds herself trapped in the disorientating and nightmarish world of Coldenbrae, more living thing than building of wood and stone, with its many tentacles reaching far into society and threatening Rose and her future if she ran away.

Gothic elements are all deliciously present here - this would be a great read for a suitably dark and gloomy weekend. Sea mists, forbidding weather, long, dark and lonely corridors... I love it all.

Madam will be published in February 2021 and gets a solid 3/5 stars from me.

Dark, gothic novel set an a cryptic all-girls boarding school - are you serious?! Gave me all the vibes.

As soon as I read the blurb, I knew it was the right book for me. Caldonbrae Hall, a creepy elite boarding school for girls, in Scotland no less, where there's more that meets the eye... And oh boy, was there more to this seemingly pristine high-class school!

This novel follows Rose Christie, a young Classics teacher who just managed to land a dream job at Caldonbrae Hall. The isolated campus is beautiful and filled with ambitious young women at the top of the society. Rose is amazed at everything around her, but very soon various creepy signs tell her that something is very wrong. These hints made for a twisty gothic mystery - especially because when Rose finds out what really takes place at this boarding school, what follows is an even creepier quest about who is behind all of this.

Madam is a very suspenseful dark academia novel which will please all fans of gothic vibes in literature. I was mesmerized by the mystery as well as the writing, which made me feel unsettled all throughout the book. Phoebe Wynne gave me the best kind of escape I needed in this moment.

*Thank you to the Publisher for a free advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

If you’ve heard the hype surrounding this book, believe it!
It’s creepy, feminist, shocking, and so so intriguing!

Set in a boarding school for girls in a remote Scottish location, Rose is offered a teaching role unlike any she has had before... I don’t want to give any more of the plot away because I somehow managed to go into this one blind, avoiding all spoilers at all costs, and I think it made it all the more incredible for me!

There were elements which reminded me of Rebecca by du Maurier, The Betrayals by Bridget Collins, and possibly even St. Trinians, in some ways but it was also so unique - I’ve never read anything quite like it! I literally can’t stop thinking about it - the feminist elements, the mystery and intrigue, the excellent characterisation, and not to mention the ending (😱). This one is going to be BIG in 2021 for sure!

With a gothic feel in both setting and characters, this book offers an opportunity to reflect on women and power and the evolution of both. It’s a great story in and of itself but the messaging around women’s empowerment is an extra and important aspect.