A Darker Mischief is an excellent entry into the young adult genre. There is no doubt that this title will be successful in libraries serving young adult patrons who are looking for a dark and mysterious story.

"The Honeys meets The Secret History in a work of dark academia like no other - a boarding school thriller about a queer teen from Mississippi who finds himself swept into a world of old money, privilege, and the secret society at the heart of it all.

When Cal Ware wins a scholarship to an elite New England boarding school, he's thrilled to leave his past behind. Back home in Mississippi, he was the poor, queer kid who never fit in. But at Essex Academy, he'll be able to reinvent himself. Or so he hopes...

But at Essex, Cal's classmates only see his cheap clothes and old iPhone. They mock his accent, and can't believe he's never left the country, or heard of The Hamptons. Cal, at his breaking point, is about to give up and return to Mississippi when he learns about a secret society on campus - the key to becoming Essex royalty.

Cal knows he's not exactly secret society material, but to his surprise, he finds an unlikely champion in the handsome, charismatic, and slightly dangerous Luke Kim. As they get swept up in the mystery and glamour of the Rush process, Cal finds himself falling in love for the first time.

But as the initiation rituals grow riskier - and increasingly nefarious - Cal must decide how far he's willing to go, and how much of himself he's willing to sacrifice, to save everything and everyone he cherishes most. Because nothing at Essex - not even Cal's first love - is quite what it seems."

Wait, because until recently I had a janky old iPhone 6 would that mean I'd be looked down on? Team Cal!

I’m going to say this is a “me thing” and call it a day. The writing was pretty good and the story, as a whole, had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, but by 30% I was scratching my head. Yea, this had darkish academia vibes and hidden society vibes but then everything just went all over the place! The riddles seemed nonsensical and when you find out the truth, you’re left questioning everything.

And then the epilogue just sealed my fate. Of course this isn’t just a YA romance, but there’s ZERO HEA. What you learn in the epilogue seems to unravel any romance that may have developed which makes it all pointless.

3 stars, because the writing IS good. But that’s all I can really say.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC.

1 Sentence Summary: Cal—the poor, southern, queer kid—is never going to fit in at his new fancy New England boarding school, but when he learns about a secret society on campus he decides to try to join as a way to reinvent himself, and it’s the best decision he’s ever made because he meets charismatic and mysterious Luke Kim, but then the initiation rituals start to get more and more dangerous, everyone is hiding secrets, and nothing is what it seems.

My Thoughts: This was a wild ride. Like, what did I even read?! Veryyy creepy and disturbing (in a…mostly…good way I think haha).

The creepy dark academia thriller vibes were definitely there. The plot was definitely… out there. It was a rollercoaster from start to finish and I had to suspend my disbelief for most of it, but I still had a lot of fun.

I don’t think a single character in this book was mentally stable. Which made the romance interesting, to say the least.

There were some writing things that annoyed me, like random asides that were thrown in, weird dialogue, and an overabundance of exclamation marks, but I’m hoping some of that gets fixed before publishing.

Oh and the whole “10 years later” epilogue thing seemed so unnecessary (and was pretty weird too but what was I expecting at this point, definitely not a normal ending lol).

Overall though, I did enjoy reading this, and all I can say is WHAT?! (Mostly non derogatory)

Recommend to: Fans of boarding schools, secret societies, & mysterious disappearances.

(Warnings: swearing; bullying; underage drinking; sexual content; kidnapping; violence; death)

Derek Milman is an incredibly gifted thriller writer; his mysteries are age-appropriate, but still present a challenge to the reader, in a good way. His writing is mature, elevated, but the essence and feeling of adolescence are there too. In A DARKER MISCHIEF, he sets his reader in an elite academy, the kind that smart, lonely, and/or dreamy kids everywhere dream about. What I found refreshing right from the start, though, is that our protagonist, Cal, also dreams of these things and he is every bit as mystified and enamored of his setting as the reader, making the book instantly immersive. When the "secret society" theme kicks off, the tension goes TIGHT, and every page seeps with paranoia and dread, but also the primal excitement of discovery. The blend is absolutely intoxicating, and I loved watching the protagonist solve riddles, finish challenges, and navigate his own changing social status, another age-appropriate and absorbing theme that keeps the more outlandish themes and acts grounded. If there is a single complaint, I wish that the ending had been a bit more fleshed out, less rushed, but that's a MINOR quibble, and I would still give this one five stars. I cannot WAIT for more thrillers from Derek Milman!

"Is being intimate with someone only knowing as many pieces of them as they allow you to know, the scraps of memory and dreams and trauma and aspirations that make up their core, that they're willing or able to share? Does anyone really know the whole truth of anyone?"

Firstly, thank you to Scholastic Press, Derek Milman and Netgalley for a free advance copy in return for my honest feedback. When I started this book, I was a little skeptical because the beginning was feeling somehow both rushed and too slow all at once. Looking back, I think it just took some time to get used to Milman's writing style. Once I got into the story, I was hooked. The way everything unraveled was fun and engaging, leaving me wanting more at every turn. However, parts of the end also felt a bit rushed for me, unfortunately. I think an extra 10-30 pages, or even more, to take our time with some of it would've been fine. All around a solid read, though!

Some extras just for Netgalley:
Perhaps I missed the references earlier on into the book, but I found myself surprised to find out that Cal was blind in one eye so far in. Also, while the betrayal of Luke would've been absolutely crushing otherwise, I think that whole storyline was a little overt for my taste. The many moments of mini-betrayals personally left me jaded about their relationship, which made it hard to connect to them as a couple and therefore I didn't feel much when the big reveal happened. Towards the very end, I generally liked how things wrapped up, but I also felt that more would've been more in this case. The whole book, we're bombarded with minute details about practically everything, but in the end, everything seems to just breeze by. "Okay Gretchen and Pinky are gone, run!" "Bye Luke!" "I woke up with little to no memory of how I got here." I suppose it felt like we were just being told the ending very briskly, instead of experiencing those things with Cal. However, I did appreciate the time jump 10 years into the future where we get to see how Cal turned out after all of this, Once again, a generally solid book that I enjoyed.

I flew through this one. I'm honestly not surprised. I love Derek's writing. But this was definitely hard to put down.

Cal is such a sweet kid. He doesn't fit in at school or his hometown. There was an incident that happened that made his parents send him to this school on scholarship. His dad is possibly being sued or charged with a crime and his mom is battling cancer. It's really hard for him to be a sophomore transfer but he gets along ok with him roommate. He also meets Luke and is charmed right away. Luke is bit dangerous and a loose cannon. But Cal can't stay away. They both pledge for the secret society and get to partner up. Most of the society stuff is fun exploration, but it starts to change. Cal worries about getting caught, but this society can also help him. And then there's Luke. So Cal stays in and keeps doing things that seem more dangerous as the year goes on. He makes some new friends, but he also finds that he can't trust everyone he's around.

I very much love that there was an ending that was in the future. I needed to know what happened. So thank you Derek. I gave this book 5 stars.

Thank you to Netgalley for my earc.

3 stars for a DNF because I don't like to give much of a rating if I don't complete it.

Unfortunately this book really was not for me. The writing style threw me off immediately- I tried to push past this but found that I could not. It's very blunt with a lot of telling instead of showing. Kind of just dumping information at you without a ton of pay off or moving on from that style.

I think this book could do well with the right audience, unfortunately that's just not me this time.

4.25 - A twisty, turny dark academia book with a complicated and troubled main character. A secret society recruiting students to perform different tasks to try to become members. A sweet, endearing, but complicated male-male romance. A manic and feverdream-like feeling throughout. Lots of troubled pasts haunting these characters. A wild ride if you just go along with it.

I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC. I was super excited to read this, but unfortunately, it just didnt hold my attention. The book is pitched as a LGBTQ+ Dark Academia novel, which seemed like it was about to become one of my new favorites, but the characters and plot just did not connect with me. The prologue almost immeditely lost me as I thought it was already straying from it's premise. Honestly, I just *really* did not like the dilogue. The cover was gorgeous though!

Spoilers below!

Meet Cal. He’s your generic dark academia outsider protagonist. Stupid runs in his family (his insurance adjuster father is getting sued for failing to maintain insurance for his haunted house hobby), so he ignores every red flag under the sun about both Luke Kim, the soccer-playing, drug-dealing, street artist/love interest whose most interesting (though oft repeated) quality is that he’s a chimera, and Society, a secret society that hasn’t come up with a better name in their two-hundred-year history (though don’t fret, they have the obligatory Latin motto(s)).

Society is all about exploring the secrets of Essex (an elite New England boarding school founded on the grounds of a Colonial college à la Yale that never made it past the Revolution), and luckily for us all, Cal spent the entire summer before entering Essex reading about its history, so every piece of info dumping is prefaced with “I read about (insert monument name)” or some variation thereof (I counted nine before I got bored).

Don’t worry about remembering which building is where or which alumnus/a/ae did what because we hardly revisit any of them (either structure or graduate). The exclusion of a map in a book about a Society dedicated to exploring its campus is just one of the many mysteries of A Darker Mischief. How Luke loses his arm is another. Seriously, did he meet a monster in the tunnels? Was he burned? For all the buildup about how very, very dangerous the steam tunnel network is, that is not an injury that I saw coming.

There’s a lot going on in A Darker Mischief: in addition to his father’s legal troubles, Cal’s mother has cancer and he himself was the victim of a hate crime when his former hookup blinds him in one eye with acid during a homophobic attack, and that’s just the stuff that happens before the book starts. Cal contracting herpes, staying in touch with his attacker, but it turns out the attacker is actually dead, and Cal’s just been talking to himself, and oh, Society (and Cal) kidnap the Vice-President’s daughter are just some of the things that made it hard for me to care among the chaos. There’s also a highly uncomfortable scene in which Cal walks in on his boyfriend blowing an upperclassman that Cal treats like cheating, but that reads like sexual assault to me, given that we know said upperclassman (the villainously named Pinky Lynch) has some sort of hold over Luke.

The following passage struck me as as potential barometer for how a reader might react to A Darker Mischief:

“One of the hooded adults, wearing a silver masquerade mask and holding a staff unlooses himself from the tenebrous perimeter and steps forward.

‘You are now part of a two-hundred-and-ten-year-old tradition: the creative, through exploration of Essex’s rich history,’ the man says. ‘Society was founded on the idea of brotherhood; working together, forming bonds that will lead to lifelong friendships while uncovering campus secrets.’”

If describing someone stepping from a circle into its center by using “unlooses himself from its tenebrous center” strikes you as poetic rather than pretentious, you may have an easier time with A Darker Mischief than I did. Suffice it to say, I found it to be a major letdown, which was especially sad considering the glorious cover and the fact that it was one of my most anticipated 2024 reads.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

A Darker Mischief follows Cal Ware, whose poor background makes him stand out from the rich elite students of Essex. This isolation he feels leads him to discover a secret society in Essex. As a member of the society, he uncovers the deepest secrets of Essex during his investigations. During his time at Essex, he meets Luke Kim, an unlikely companion who also feels the pull of the mysterious secret society. As they complete the initiation process, the two boys get closer and fall in love. But whether this love can last in the face of the society and the risky investigations is questionable.

I enjoyed this book immensely. I definitely can't do it justice with my summary above, but those have never been my strong suit. Trust me, this book will keep your interest. There are A LOT of secrets and twists in this book. For the last half, I was spinning in circles keeping track of all the different things happening. This didn't hinder my enjoyment at all, I loved that I was always guessing! The secret society was incredibly intriguing. The society is simultaneously menacing, curious, and empowering for both the reader and Cal. The investigations for the society, "explos," were fascinating, and I was getting as lost in them as Cal was. This book was easily 5 stars!

Thank you to netgalley and Scholastic | Scholastic Press for allowing me to read this book. This was one of my most anticipated reads of the year and let me tell you this book did not disappoint,

Really loved this upper YA queer dark academia thriller. It was fun but also atmospheric. I flew through it.

“A Darker Mischief,” by Derek Milman

Cal gets a scholarship to an elite New England boarding school, and he hopes he can create a future where he’s not just the queer poor kid. Unfortunately, the kids notice right away that he’s poor and he is made fun of and left out. Until he learns of a secret society on campus and Cal and a boy Luke join up to get accepted into the mysterious and dangerous society that will solidify Cal’s new life.

Good coming-of-age queer story of a non-rich kid in a rich school/ boarding school. I liked the secret society aspect of the book. I liked the two main male characters and their relationship. When I was reading it, I was thinking this book would make a great show. 3 out of 5 stars.

Thank you for the ARC, Netgalley.

**I received an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley.**

Actual rating: 3.5

Derek Milman presents his newest YA thriller, A Darker Mischief. Readers follow Cal, a queer transfer student from small town Mississippi who is starting his sophomore year at an elite boarding school. Cal hopes to be able to reinvent himself in New England after the Incident, but as a poor scholarship student he is far from fitting in. Cal learns about a secret society on campus and begins the rush process, intertwining his fate with the handsome and dangerous Luke Kim. As Cal develops feelings for Luke, the tasks assigned by the secret society get more and more daring and even unethical. Cal must decide how far he is willing to go to protect the people he cares about most.

I will never get tired of queer dark academia. Milman does a solid job at building the atmosphere of the campus and the structure of the secret society. The secrets on secrets layered was something that provided a forward drive for the book, even if the layering was sometimes messy.

Cal and Luke are compelling characters to follow. Both of them have their own tragic back story components and have enough things they want to hide in order to land in the morally grey area. Their relationship is, at best, toxic and, at times, codependent. Everything about the characters in this book tends toward being messy, with valid plot development reasons.

My main reason for not rating this book higher is some strange pacing issues throughout the book. Where the initiation into society originally drives the plot, the movement is very sequential and orderly. Toward the climax of the book, there was an odd devolution of order into a more chaotic process. That chaos was quelled before the plot was resolved and left things tied with some wonky decisions and a tidy bow.

Overall. I enjoyed my time with A Darker Mischief and was pleased to have an opportunity to read it early.

I don't know where to even start. I guess I'll just say thank you to netgalley for giving me an ARC of this book. This book was like nothing I have ever read before. The writing style was so unique. At the beginning I was unsure if I would like it, but after the first few chapters I absolutely loved it. I could not put it down and the relationship between Luke and Cal was so complex I was going through every emotion while reading about them. I loved everything from the beginning to the climax. I have like no words to describe how much I love the story. The only part I wasn't particularly fond of was the ending. I felt like there was so much build up throughout the story just for everything to be vaguely and suddenly ended. I wanted so much more, but I understand why it had to end the way it did. With how self destructive Luke was, I'm not surprised that he died young. I jusy wanted them to hash it out more, get some closure even if they didn't end up together again. I wanted angst, but without death I guess. Overall though, I would definitely recommend this book.

This was a fun queer dark academia YA thriller. I would say this is definitely more upper YA, I don't think I would have understood most of this or it would've been too much at ages 14-16. There's a lot of interesting history/architect information that made it feel dark academia. I really like how this book ended and we saw where everyone sort of ended up.

"A Darker Mischief" dives into the world of Cal Ware, a scholarship student from Mississippi thrust into the elite and unforgiving halls of Essex Academy. Seeking a fresh start, Cal encounters a harsh reality – wealth, privilege, and a ruthless social hierarchy define life at Essex. Bullied and ostracized, Cal is on the verge of leaving when a glimmer of hope emerges: a secret society promising acceptance and power.

Enter Luke Kim, a charismatic classmate who offers Cal a path into this exclusive world. As Cal ventures deeper into the "Rush" process, he grapples with a burgeoning romance with Luke amidst increasingly dangerous initiation rituals. The allure of belonging clashes with the unsettling nature of the society's secrets, forcing Cal to confront a critical question – is this acceptance worth the price of his integrity and safety?

This book is strong due to how it addresses:

Class and Identity: The novel explores themes of classism, navigating a new social order, and the struggle to fit in.

Self-discovery and Belonging: Cal's journey is one of self-discovery as he seeks acceptance and belonging in a hostile environment.

Dark Academia: The prestigious Essex Academy harbors a dark secret society, adding a layer of suspense and intrigue.

First Love and Moral Dilemmas: Cal's first love story intertwines with moral dilemmas he faces within the society's initiation rituals.

Thank you Scholastic and Netgalley for this eARC, these opinions are my own. Cal Ware is from a small town in the south. Due to the fact that he’s gay and The Incident, as well as things going on with his parents, life isn’t the easiest for him there. Getting into a fancy prep school should be just the chance he needs to reinvent himself. Only there he faces different challenges, like being poor and the fact that he talks differently. One night in his loneliness he stumbles across a group of students in masks. Determined to figure out what’s going on he finds a Secret Society. He thrilled when he gets the chance to rush. Along with that he meets Luke, the mysterious jock, who makes him feel seen. As they dive deeper into Society they may just find things aren’t exactly what they seem. With Luke’s mysterious past and Cal’s struggles with The Incident, can the two learn to trust each other? As Cal learns more about Society and what they do will he find he’s bitten off more than he could chew? After all how dark is too dark? An enjoyable read that will drag you in deeper! Cal and Society’s interest in history was intriguing and fascinating. Luke’s mysterious ways often had me questioning whether he could be trusted but his relationship with Cal is really cute! Also so many of the queer community will be able to relate to Cal’s feelings of isolation and loneliness! Dark, twisted, surprising, and so very queer! Highly recommend checking this one out!