By Ellie Eaton

After watching Paris Hilton’s documentary “This is Paris” (YouTube), that explored her past experiences from her time at boarding school and the trauma and PTSD that follows. I was craving more stories from this exclusive community, I was pleased as punch when I received this free copy from Harper Collins Canada and HCCFrenzy in exchange for a honest review. Ellie is able to transform the readers into a boarding school in England, UK where all the feelings of being a teenage girl come rushing back. It was bittersweet to be transported back to be a teenager, I was quickly reminded of what it is like. The backstabbing, arrogance, all knowing behaviour, and selfish attitude that makes adults turn their heads, as no one wants to deal with teenage girls. 

This novel does a good job at sharing stories that need to be talked about more in literature to normalize it. This novel does touch on topics of adolescent sexuality and female identity that is so important for every individual to discover. The writing in this story does a great job at showing the parallels in our lives of how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. How you can remember a memory but when you reflect back on it or hear it form an other point of view. It totally changes the perspective of the experience.

 

“With the emotional power of Normal People and the reflective haze of The Girls, a magnetic novel that moves between present-day Los Angeles and a British boarding school in the 1990s, exploring the destructive relationships between teenage girls. 

Can we ever really escape our past?

The girls of St John the Divine, an elite English boarding school, were notorious for flipping their hair, harassing teachers, chasing boys, and chain-smoking cigarettes. They were fiercely loyal, sharp-tongued, and cuttingly humorous in the way that only teenage girls can be. For Josephine, now in her thirties, the years at St John were a lifetime ago. She hasn’t spoken to another Divine in fifteen years, not since the day the school shuttered its doors in disgrace.

Yet now Josephine inexplicably finds herself returning to her old stomping grounds. The visit provokes blurry recollections of those doomed final weeks that rocked the community. Ruminating on the past, Josephine becomes obsessed with her teenage identity and the forgotten girls of her one-time orbit. With each memory that resurfaces, she circles closer to the violent secret at the heart of the school’s scandal. But the more Josephine recalls, the further her life unravels, derailing not just her marriage and career, but her entire sense of self. 

Suspenseful, provocative, and compulsively readable, The Divines is a scorching examination of the power of adolescent sexuality, female identity, and the destructive class divide. Exposing the tension between the lives we lead as adults and the experiences that form us, Eaton probes us to consider how our memories as adults compel us to reexamine our pasts.” – Author’s synonyms from Goodreads

This novel does have some issues for me, I found that their were many loose ends that never got closure, it took a long time to get to the climax of the story. I didn’t feel very connected to this character, I didn’t have empathy for her behaviour ( I found her to be very selfish and mean, even as an adult), the plot was all over the place and the pacing was weird, the character development is lacking and it just felt like the first half lacked story line and all the important information was given to the reader in the last quarter of the novel.  

I would rate this novel a overall 2.5 stars out of 5. 

Keep on Reading,

The Reading Dyslexic