They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it the Plain Bad Heroine Society. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. Our story begins in 1902, at the Brookhants School for Girls. The award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative and original horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girls-a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit Named a Most Anticipated Book by Entertainment Weekly

'A multi-faceted novel, equal parts gothic, sharply funny, sapphic romance, historical, and, of course, spooky.' -ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY exquisite.' -Ron Charles, THE WASHINGTON POST what makes all this so much fun is Danforth's deliciously ghoulish voice. From the real-life memoir to cult horror film references, this is a novel that revels in its intertextuality.'A delectable brew of gothic horror and Hollywood satire. Overall its complexity works in its favour. While things are coming to a head in the Edwardian era, the filming of the movie is only just beginning, around page 400, in the modern-day strand. The sheer amount that it takes on leaves the novel with a few issues, most notably pacing. Plain Bad Heroines is out in ebook next week (Photo: Borough Press) It continues Danforth’s exploration of queer female sexuality, but there is a broader cast of characters to explore the topic from several angles, including historic lesbianism, the boundaries between friendship and love, and celebrity queerness in the social media age.

Plain Bad Heroines is a heftier, more ambitious book, juggling multiple narrators, timelines and secrets. The story was adapted into a film starring Chloë Grace Moretz, and you can’t help but wonder how much of that process informed Danforth’s depiction of Merritt, a writer thrust into the alien world of Hollywood. Olivia Sudjic on her new book Asylum Road: ‘Novels offer a way of sifting through the chaos’Įmily M Danforth is known for her 2012 debut, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a young adult novel about a teenage girl sent to a gay conversion camp.

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth