This book was compared to "The Secret History," but it's much better than that. I could never understand the characters in that book; "The World" gives us teenagers we've known and been. The ending is a shocker.

Well! This was definitely compelling. I felt that the blurb and cover did not match the tone of the story at all, and the actual writing came across as a parody of a dark academia novel. The World Cannot Give promises a fraught academic atmosphere with sapphic longing, and while pieces of those aspects were present, nothing actually hit the mark for me. The characters were a little too flat and grating to pull me into rooting for them, and the school setting felt like a prop - I wanted to see the structures of the school itself with its academics. However, I did binge the whole thing in a day, and I can't say I wasn't fascinated, so that bumps it up a few stars for me! I just wish it had committed to taking itself seriously, or being a parody of dark academia themes.

"The World Cannot Give" is an incredibly intense story. Laura Stearns favorite book is "All Before Them", by Sebastian Webster, who died at age nineteen fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Laura is an emotional girl by nature and the words of Webster evoke profound emotion in her; she wants to experience "a shipwreck of the soul", as described in the book. Laura is from Henderson, Nevada, but she managed to convince her parents to let her transfer to St. Dunstan's Academy, a small private prep school in Maine, for her junior year. St. Dunstan's is the school Webster attended. At her first Evensong (the mandatory chapel service), she is mesmerized both by the choral music and by Virginia Strauss, the choir president.

Virginia Strauss has an intensity that is unmatched by anyone, and it is evident in how she acts, including how she runs the choir. The five boys in the choir are essentially her followers, upholding her ideals and espousing her philosophy, based in Webster, about the World-Historical and the sclerotic modern world. Laura becomes enamored of Virginia as well, seeing in her someone who understands and values Webster like she does, and seeing someone who will be World-Historical one day. Laura knows that is not her future -- she is better fit to be the helpmate or the chronicler, a role she takes for Virginia.

Of course, this being a prep school, there has to be plenty of drama, all of which revolves around Virginia. There are fellow students who want to end mandatory Evensong and who want to rid the school of its connection to Webster, whom they view in a profoundly different and unfavorable light than Virginia and Laura. There is Bonnie, who is intense in her own way, with her social media posts and videos, and her brashness, which grates on Virginia, both because she finds Bonnie so "unserious" and because Bonnie is romantically involved, or at least wants to be, with Brad, a member of the choir. Bonnie is Laura's roommate, which means Laura cannot escape the resulting drama. There is the new chaplain, Reverend Tipton, who is decidedly not enamored by Virginia, and whose behavior does not fit Virginia's expectations.

The tension will explode in rather dramatic fashion. Some of the events are predictable, but others are quite surprising. Laura's understanding of herself and of Virginia will be profoundly altered.

Four years ago, I read Tara Isabella Burton’s Social Creature, a novel that was one of my favorites that year. I said it was “full of sass and swagger…genius pacing…a novel that should take all of us by storm…the makings of a cult classic.” Did I love it? Yes I did. So imagine my excitement when I saw that she had a new one coming out. Sad to say, The World Cannot Give doesn’t reach the same level. It’s dull, and it takes itself far too seriously.

Nevertheless, my thanks go to Net Galley and Simon and Schuster for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan’s Academy; she is inspired by a novel written by a long-ago alum named Sebastian Webster. Laura yearns to find the “shipwreck of the soul” she finds in Webster’s book. Indeed, Webster has an enthusiastic band of followers at St. Dunstan’s, and so in a sense, Laura has come to the right place.

So we have these elements: a private boarding school—and this setting is in danger of being overused lately, but nothing that excellent writing cannot overcome, although that doesn’t happen here. We also have a slavish clique and hyper-religious students; and we have a whole lot of navel gazing. Or, as the synopsis tells us, “The World Cannot Give is a shocking meditation on the power, and danger, of wanting more from the world.”

If anything here makes your pulse quicken, by all means, go get this book. As for me, I tried. I did. When I couldn’t push myself through my digital copy after multiple tries, I checked out the audio version from the library; if anything, it was more pretentious and obnoxious than the written version. Yikes. I stuck with the audio version through the first two torturous hours, and then I threw in the towel.

This shipwreck is available to the public now.

The World Cannot Give is dark academia at its finest, and deserves a place alongside The Secret History. It’s a tale of hero worship, toxic friendships, and queer desire, told in lush prose. Laura and her friends are convincingly obsessed with so-called World Historical ideals while being entirely self-absorbed and petty in their personal lives. It was a gripping read with a satisfyingly tragic ending and I recommend it to any lover of the genre.

Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for an early copy of this book.

This book will bring back uncomfortable memories of your youth, for sure. It captures all the awkward, wonderful, terrible times of being an adolescent in a thriller/mystery setting.

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: none
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

I can see why this book is potentially divisive but, honestly, I kind of dug the hell out of it. There’s something “have your cake and eat it”-ish about dark academia evoking texts that are themselves a deconstruction of dark academia evoking texts. But you know what? I like cake, I like having cake, and I like eating cake.

The premise here is that our POV character, Laura Stearns, is a weak-willed sentimentalist from nowhere who is obsessed with a book called All Before Them—the single extant work of somewhat Byronic-figure called Sebastian Webster (aka the prep school prophet: essentially he wrote one book about his deep discontent with the world and then died in the Spanish wars). She manages to get accepted to St Dunstan’s, the prep school where Webster wrote his indulgent, adolescent dirge which his, of course, an oldy-styley building set on some wild cliffs with a gothic chapel from which the super-exclusive school choir sing mandatory Evensong. The school choir is ruled over by its lead soprano (and only girl), Virginia Strauss. Needless to say—this is after a dark story novel after all—Laura soon finds herself drawn into the insular world of the choir, whose priorities and approach to life are set by Virginia who is, of course, a fellow Webster enthusiast. As foils to Strauss and the choir, we also have Isobel Zhao, an openly gay anti-traditionalist who is campaigning to make the school more accessible, and Bonnie di Angelis who spends all her time harnessing the dark academia aesthetic to accrue social media fame (something the rest of the school rather looks down on).

The plot kind of follows the usual dark academia paths of obsession, toxic relationships, sexual power, and what I believe The Secret History called “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” But it deploys its themes in ways I found simultaneously effective as manifestations of those themes and challenges to them. This meant that The World Cannot Give ended up being one of the more successful takes on dark academia I’ve read for, well, a while?

I’ve spoken before about my ambivalent relationship with The Secret History. I read it a just the right time that it spoke my lonely teenage soul that was desperate for grandeur, art (ART!) and belonging, and ideally for icily indifferent but wildly cool girls and boys I could tormentedly fall into destructive love with. I’ve never dared read it since because … I think in my late-thirties I will have no fucking time for either it or my adolescent self. I think Francis’s tragic gayness will grate on me. I will think the narrator’s crush on Camilla is the wrong kind of creepy. I will think Julian is abusive in the wrong kind of way. And, most importantly, I will not be properly fascinated by Henry.

Murdering your most annoying friend in the woods, though? I am always here for that.

The problem is, though, that the *feeling* The Secret History lingers. I read other dark academia books looking for, and not finding, that feeling. Either because The Secret History was not meant to be a subgenre (or even an aesthetic) or because I’m not fourteen-years-old. In any case, to get back to The World Cannot Give it gave me that feeling, but also expected me to examine it and question it. And I really appreciated that.

While Laura is our POV character, she isn’t the narrative voice: that belongs to an archly detached narrator who nevertheless reserves their omniscience for Laura alone. It creates an odd-doubling effect where the reader is both experiencing events with Laura and watching her at the same time, and allows you to be more patient than perhaps you would otherwise be every time somebody make a comment about the “sclerotic modern world” (which is a Websterism). In terms of Webster himself, the book walks a very careful line, ensuring we know enough about his work to understand why a group of teenagers might latch onto it hard and feel it spoke to them very personally … but also to kind of question its utter bullshittery. I mean, yes, Webster’s search for meaning, grandeur, purpose, “shipwreck of the soul”, whatever, makes for a good distillation of the experience of adolescence for most people … but it’s also profoundly privileged. Right down to the fact his supposed fictional book is thinly veiled autobiography, Webster himself having gone posh-arse prep school, lost himself in drugs, sex and violence as part of his search for meaning, and finally got killed in the Spanish Civil War. Fighting FOR Franco.

I think it’s also really telling that Webster’s book is … not to put too fine a point on it all about boys. There’s a brief reference to a townie he had a fling with, and obviously it’s not his fault that his school was an all-boy’s school at the time, but women just do no feature in his world at all. In fact, there’s a really interesting sequence near the beginning when Laura has to sort of de-gender herself to imagine having any sort of personal relationship with Webster, or at least the Webster she has constructed based on this one book he wrote. Webster’s complicated legacy is interwoven with the story: for example, Isobel Zhao confronts Laura directly with the fact he was, at best, a fascist sympathiser (something Laura manages to sort of politely look past because she needs what he represents to her more than she needs a complex reality) and at one point there’s a campaign to have his statue removed on account of the whole … y’know fascist sympathiser thing. (Which felt kind of pertinent given the whole Rhodes statue debacle that … might still be on-going at Oxford?).

I think the broader point, though, about what Webster represents both in the book and as a commentary on dark academia in general is the way dark academia encourages us to invest in figures and institutions that are, essentially and inescapably, bastions of cisheteropatriarchal orthodoxy.

To put it another way (and I’m aware this isn’t a great insight or anything) dark academia isn’t so much a longing for the picturesque at all costs. It’s a longing to be a cishet white man with so much wealth and privilege you can afford to worry about the world not offering you the soul-re-shaping experiences you feel you’re entitled to.

And that’s, well. Frankly that’s a problem. No matter how much we like leatherbound books and the scent of cold stone.

Ultimately, The World Cannot Give is preoccupied with the role of women within the whole dark academia context. Not in an overt “I’m a feminist re-working as me how” way but in terms of its themes and its characters, and how the fact the characters are young woman (mostly queer young women, whether they acknowledge or not) changes their relationship to the patriarchal power that lies of the heart of dark academia. It ended up making me reflect a lot on the role of Camilla in The Secret History: in many ways she’s the least well-articulated of all the characters in that book (even the one who gets literally murdered), being mysterious and almost abstract to the narrator. He’s kind of in love with her but only because she represents a more acceptable vessel for love/desire than either Charles (who he might actually be in love with) or Henry (who might actually be in love with him). And, mostly, Camilla is described in terms of her … boyishness and, um, frigidity. Unlike the others who are allowed flashes of humanising vulnerability, Camilla isn’t really a person at all. She’s an ideal, a safe harbour for socially inappropriate desire, a kind of negative space that exists mostly as an absence of masculinity?

And, interestingly enough, while Virgina Strauss is willing to occupy a similar role for the men of the choir she is permitted to retain her power over them. The moment she slips, becomes human, damaged, vulnerable, any other than an unassailable ice queen, their very desire for her becomes an instrument of vengeance over her. It’s … intense and fascinating and hard to read all at once.

Which sort of sums up the book, to be honest.

I will say, that it’s a book whose characters are drawn in bold, dramatic strokes, partially because that’s how Laura sees them, and partially, I think, because they’re fucking teenagers? While Laura herself is a devoted sidekick to Virginia, and consequently hates Bonnie and is both threatened and drawn to Isobel, my sense was that book actually presents the women fairly neutrally. They’re all searching for love, meaning, power, and identity, it’s just they’re doing so in ways that make them feel oppositional to each other: Bonnie’s Instagramming makes her feel shallow to the others, but Virginia envies her likeability and charm, Virginia’s apparent invulnerability makes people want to tear her down and her semi-masochistic spirituality infuriates Isobel who is also in love with her and views Virgina’s refusal to embrace a queer identity as a personal rejection. The boys, by contrast, are not very well articulated (Anton is a jock, Barry is pretentious, Ivan is prissy, Barry is the ambiguous one, and then there’s another who I literally cannot remember, or maybe there’s only four, fuck me) but that kind of feels deliberate? Especially because, by the end of the book, their stories—in the public eye at least—have completely erased Isobel and Virginia. Bringing us neatly back to the question of who dark academia is really for.

Although, while I’m on the subject of the characters, I might add that characters like Virginia Strauss are incredibly hard to write: she’s awful but charismatic and, as the book goes on, increasingly vulnerable in ways that Laura is unable to address. That’s such a difficult balance to get right. Charisma in particular … I mean … how do you manifest something so chemical and specific on the page? But, y’know, I think maybe I’d have jumped off a cliff (or worse) for Virginia Strauss too. I didn’t like her but … there’s something about her. Something that made Laura’s obsession with her feel, to me, genuinely understandable and real. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Anyway, I realise this isn’t much of a review because it’s not … about the book, so much about a relationship I perceived the book as having to dark academia as a thing. But I don’t want really want to spoil too much of the book (even though its plot beats of insecurity, obsession, happiness, and doom are the traditional dark academia plot beats). For me, I also think it’s easier to deconstruct something for the sake of deconstructing it, and then discover you have nothing to say about it except that it can be deconstructed. Like, there’s a student building in one of the Oxford colleges, I forget which, that was designed by an architect who felt it was important to have the interior bits of building on the OUTSIDE so you could, like, really think about what, like, what a building MEANS man. And I think what most people discover a building means is that there are strong reasons to have the inside bits of a building on the inside rather than the outside. I usually end up feeling like that about books that are self-consciously invested in acts of deconstruction. Which is to say, there’s no point teasing something apart until you see its individual elements unless you can tell me something about those elements beyond simple fact that they exist.

I mean, I know there are lemons in a lemon tart. I don’t need a deconstructed lemon tart to tell me that.

With The World Cannot Give, however, I liked what it had to say about the elements of dark academia that we politely overlook (much as Laura politely overlooks Webster’s fascists sympathies) in order to enjoy its themes and its aesthetic. I liked that it explored what dark academia means (or doesn’t mean) when it comes to the lives, experiences, and needs of young queer women. And I liked that it still managed to give me all those dark academia feels that are, these days, something of a guilty pleasure. There’s also some slightly sharply observed moments when the book reminds you just how little the rest of the school cares about the dramas of its secret society choir. Because, I mean, you wouldn’t care would you? Not realistically. You’d be too busy studying for your exams and worrying if the boy/girl/non-binary person you fancied you back to give a fuck that some classics weirdos ate a live deer and then murdered someone because Bacchus. On top of which, I genuinely felt that the book managed to depict some elements of the teenage experience (although, hey, bear in mind I haven’t had a teenage experience for over fifteen years so what do I know) with a surprising mix of irony, empathy and sincerity. Basically, I rolled my eyes. But I also ached a bit.

And I was genuinely pleased that Laura—and oh God I can't believe I'm going to say this—managed by the end of the book to recognise that the rocks and the harbour are very fucking different things.

Okay -- I don't think any author out there writes female obsession in the nuanced, beautiful way that Tara Isabella Burton does. I first fell in love with her work when I read her other novel "Social Creatures," which is why I was so excited to pick this one up -- and it didn't disappoint!

This part thriller, part coming-of-age, part campus novel follows Laura Stearns as she transfers to a romanticized New England prep school where she gets involved with the tight-knit choir led by the passionate and alluring Virginia Strauss. The further Laura finds herself entangled with the choir boys, Virginia, and Sebastian Webster (the tragic, young author that wrote her favorite novel detailing his time at the school before dying in war) the more she becomes obsessed with Virginia and her pursuit to become what Webster calls "World Historical."

I love pretty much any book that takes place on a campus, and this novel does a great job of playing up the brooding, isolated vibe of a coastal, New England school where the students are mostly left to their own devices. This creates the perfect environment for Laura to lose herself, then find herself among her equally Webster-obsessed peers.

I also like the dynamic Burton builds between her two leads -- Laura and Virginia. She explores the depth of female friendship tinged with the often-confusing (at their age) Sapphic desire. Through this tumultuous dynamic, she allows both Laura and Virginia to come into their own in the most unexpected (and sometimes tragic) of ways.

All in all, this book is a darkly rendered reflection on the ecstasy and agony of youth -- of the hellfire of teenage passion and the consequences of the toxic dynamics we often find ourselves in at that age.

I will say, I've seen some reviews point out that the supporting characters outside of Laura and Virginia aren't well developed and fill stereotypical roles for the sake of moving the plot forward -- and I can see that. I think there was definitely room to flesh out the other characters more, which would help to make the climax of the story much more impactful.

Outside of that, I think this is a very thought-provoking novel with a shocking ending that covers issues of growing up, self-discovery, and LGBTQ identity that you will not soon forget.

This book was interesting. The characters were unhinged and obsessive and just very unlikeable. I wouldn't compare this to The Secret History... It was its own unique story.

I lost interest it’s more YA than desired. I liked the idea of the dark academia and the angel symbolism

This was fun. Elite boarding school teens - dark. I appreciated the author’s technique of using language that screams teenage angst and thinking because one attends a prestigious school, they are - by association - elite. At first the absurdness of some of the characters and dialogue bugged me but I think the author was making these choices intentionally to jump head first into that whole teenage-ness of being shallow and yet thinking you’re so deep? Either way - I’m still thinking about this one - which is kinda cool in itself. Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the advanced copy!

I’ve been struggling to write a review of this book for awhile now, because I just didn’t connect with it or enjoy it. It was extremely sad and dark. I am sure boarding schools similar to this one exist, but I have to hope the students are better behaved, better raised and more mature than the students in this book.

Ahhh! This should have worked for me. I love a campus novel and I liked the authors last book, but I found this to be a slog. I did see the secret history, but some thing about it never felt rooted in reality. I didn’t love the ending and they were a couple things that I had to suspend my disbelief on overall it was fine but not something I would recommend unfortunately

This book follows a bunch of prep school students at an elite boarding school in Maine. They worship the writing of the late Sebastian Webster, who left St. Dunstan's at 19 to fight in the Spanish American War and died. His writing was published posthumously, and has developed a cult following among the students at his alma mater.

Our main character is Laura, who is a new upperclassman at St. Dunstan's and as obsessed with Webster as they come. She falls in with the school's church choir - which is very cult-y, if you ask me - and what follows is an unravelling that held me captivated from start to finish.

I would recommend this book to fans of Donna Tartt's The Secret History and M.L. Rio's If We Were Villains!

Laura Stearns can’t wait to attend the school where her favorite book is set. Sebastian Webster died at nineteen but not before penning an iconic book and running off to fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Laura loves everything about the book, and now she gets to live in it, surrounded by smart people who also love the legacy Webster left behind, or so she thinks. When Laura meets Virginia Strauss, it’s clear who runs the school, or at least the choir, perhaps the best thing about St. Dunstan’s (at least Laura thinks so). St. Dunstan’s will change Laura in ways she cannot imagine.

It’s a fascination exploration of how intense it is to be a teenager, amplified more by being at a boarding school with primarily other teenagers, how that time and place can seem so all encompassing. Even though I didn’t love any of the characters, I appreciated them and wanted to know where they were going and how they’d end up. Even now, I’m thinking about the main character and wondering what happens to her next.

Visceral. Haunting. Intense. I definitely recommend this one. It’s out now wherever you get your books.

I think most of the "BOOK NAME meets BOOK NAME" descriptions of this book are short-sighted: It's not really like anything I've ever read before. Certainly dark academia and certainly deals with toxic love, but written in this purposefully pretentious tone that I felt perfectly conveyed prep school zealots, religious obsession, and the desire to be something more than what you are. It's a combination of archetypes I haven't seen before. The negative reviews don't seem to give the book any credit for being self-aware. Where the plot fizzles out, the intrigue intensifies.

I thought it was brilliant the way certain characters keyed into certain phrases that made them sound astute but were repeated enough to show how limited they are as teenagers. It's definitely not a dumbed-down YA read but it's not hard to get through either. I just loved it — intense, imperfect, and all-consuming. I was not surprised to learn that the author is a theological scholar. Can't wait to read more of her work.

Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for the free ebook in exchange for an honest review.

I was not crazy about his one. It felt a little braggy and arrogant. I wanted this to be a dark, sinister coming of age story, but instead I was not able to like any of the characters.

I feel like there was a period when I read a lot of books set in boarding schools along this same vein. High school junior, Laura, transfers to her dream school in Maine - the same school where her favorite author attended. He wrote only one book in his short life, but its impact is profound for Laura who idolizes him - until her adoration transfers to Virginia Strauss, the leader of the school's choir and a young woman who shares Laura's passion for the writer. She also wants to bring his aims of living a "World Historical" life. But Virginia's fanaticism and tight hold on her circle within the choir isn't quite normal...

Laura naïveté grates after a while and Virginia's reign doesn't always seem terribly plausible. This isn't exactly a fresh or unique read - especially since the characters aren't likable.... But the story - despite the lagging middle - remains compelling and I was curious the whole time to see how it would all end. The plot certainly holds some surprises, but with Virginia's character not being fully developed, it was hard to share in Laura's obsessive love for her. Ultimately, Laura doesn't really seem to grow much as a character, either, which was disappointing. But, it certainly kept my attention.

The World Cannot Give (see John 14:27)
I devoured Social Creature and couldn't wait to get my hands on this book. I've seen ties to Donna Tartt and Patricia Highsmith. I can definitely see it. Where Social Creature was Mr. Ripley, this is more like The Price of Salt. This story follows Laura Stearns from Henderson, Nevada, joining a singing group at Saint Dunstan’s school chapel. Their speciality is Anglican liturgical music, especially choral Evensong, under the sway of the strikingly charismatic girl Virginia Strauss, who proceeds to adopt Laura as a protégée and takes over her life. Laura's fixation on choir leader Virginia is a mix of sapphic and idol-worshiping, but neither of those things is what makes the situation so compelling. It’s really Burton’s subtle nuance, her description of tiny but personally monumental victories and, conversely, tiny but personally monumental failures that gives this story life.

Though the author calls the singers a “choir,” it’s technically an ensemble: five boys, Virginia and Laura.
Heavily character driven and slow burning, The World Cannot Give follows protagonist Laura, an awkward, thoughtful prep school student who suffers the hard lesson of failure to create meaning, to truly belong, and for the world to be something greater than it is.

I enjoyed Social Creature, as I mentioned, but I think I liked this one even more!.

I am a huge fan of novels that are somehow both literary fiction and also total drama. Tara Isabella Burton is so good about writing about the gossip, lust, and popularity contests that come with young womanhood, while also capturing the dark aspects. The World Cannot Give is an atmospheric, dark academia novel about obsession and how it can consume you. Young Laura Stearns believes that author Sebastian Webster's journey in his novel, All Before Them, is the key to her own life. She lives by his words and finds herself living her dream when she gets into St. Dunstan's, where Sebastian himself lived and wrote prior to his young death. She loves the long standing traditions, the boarding school style living, and the closeness is makes her feel to Webster. Like her previous school though, Laura is not confident in her position in the social structures. She is confident in her desire to be friends with, and be with, Victoria, the pious leader of the choir that lead Evensong. Evensong is transcendent for Laura and soon she finds herself alongside Victoria. What once seems like just friendship becomes more, but Laura's obsession has nothing on Victoria's.

The World Cannot Give can be read as just a new adult thriller if you'd like, but underneath the surface is a darker, deeper tale about love, loss, and the dangers of obsession. Tara Isabella Burton captures the nostalgic feeling any adult has about their youth, while also making you remember the fear, the desperation, and the uncomfortable feeling of incompetency. It's both coming-of-age and terrifying adventure all in one. I loved the reflections Laura has about beliefs, relationships, and sexuality. She begins innocent, sitting on the cusp of womanhood, and as you turn the pages you see her step into herself and let go of the things she once held dear.

It's incredibly difficult to capture this novel in a review. Tara Isabella Burton is a stunning writer, with a skill that makes any story feel otherworldly. The World Cannot Give won't be for everyone, but for those who love a journey into the melodramatic and unique, I highly recommend this novel. I was enchanted and entrapped, lured into the promise of being World-Historical and leaving ones' mark. Like Burton's debut novel, Social Creature, The World Cannot Give is not your standard new adult thriller, there's a level of intrigue there that I cannot describe properly that captures your senses and stays with you.

ARC provided.