Book: Blythewood

Author: Carol Goodman

Genre: Fiction/Teen Fiction/Supernatural/Boarding School/Fantasy

Summary: At sixteen, Avaline Hall has already buried her mother, survived a horrific factory fire, and escaped from an insane asylum. Now she’s on her way to Blythewood Academy, the elite boarding school in New York’s mist-shrouded Hudson Valley that her mother attended - and was expelled from. Though she’s afraid her high society classmates won’t accept a factory girl in their midst, Ava is desperate to unravel her family’s murky past, discover the identity of the father she’s never known, and perhaps finally understand her mother’s abrupt suicide. She’s also on the hunt for the identity of the mysterious boy who rescued her from the fire. And she suspects the answers she seeks lie at Blythewood. But nothing could have prepared her for the dark secret of what Blythewood is, and what its students are being trained to do. And the more rigorously Ava digs into the past, the more dangerous her present becomes… Vivid and atmospheric, full of mystery and magic, this romantic page-turner by bestselling author Carol Goodman tells the story of a world on the brink of change and the girl who is the catalyst for it all. - Penguin, 2013.

I appreciate the use of imagery, but the key to using it as a literary device is subtlety. In this book, imagery doesn't gently tap you on the shoulders from behind, it doesn't touch you with a gentle lover's caress. The imagery within this book comes running at you in a Pennywise mask wielding a chainsaw while screaming bloody murder. The writing is overwrought, leaning heavily towards purple prose. It tries too hard to be "gothic." It has all the subtlety of a purple plaid-patterned penguin.

You could play a drinking game while reading this book. Take two imagery. Bells. Birds. You could take a sip---not a shot, mind you, just a sip---of a low alcohol-by-volume wine with every instance of those imageries and still end up dead by alcohol poisoning before you reach the 50% mark of this book.

There is an emphasis on collective nouns in this book, because it's one of the things a girl entering Blythewood must know. You have to know terms like a teal of magpies. A murder of crows. An exaltation of larks. A cete of badgers. I would like to take this opportunity to create my own collective noun to describe the writing in this book: a fuckload of frivolity.

There's a character who is one of The Darkling. He doesn't hold a candle to Shadow & Storm Darkling. Not even close.

This book is by Carol Goodman. I didn't realize until I went and looked up the book after starting it tonight, and no wonder the writing felt so familiar. It turns out I've read a lot of her books, like The Lake of Dead Languages, and the Fairwick Chronicles, under a pseudonym.

The book is messy. The heroine (Ava) is too much. She works at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (and we all know how well THAT turns out for her). Her mother just died.

I swear to god, the most dangerous profession in the world is not that of a bomb squad technician. It is to be a parent or a sibling of a young woman in YA fiction, because mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers. They DIE. THEY ALL DIE.

Her mother is the daughter of a wealthy society woman, who ran away after becoming pregnant while at prestigious school Blythewood. After her mother's death, Ava is lockerd up in a mental hospital, then wakes up to find out that she's been taken into the care of her very rich, very bitchy grandmother.

She's now newly enrolled in Blythewood. There's a Order of the Bells.

The reader is clubbed on the head with bells and bird imagery. It is so, so, so overwrought with imagery, you cannot imagine. The girls in this school are fucking morons, I would be screaming GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE if I went through what they did. They don't question a single fucking thing.

Purple prose. Much purple prose.

Oh, insta-love. Love triangle. DING DING DING.

And I'm only 30% in.

Mommy.

After almost a week and some problems, all my books and reviews have now been imported!

There are still some bugs/lag, but I am really happy that all (yes all) my books got imported, there are even some stray books that I have no clue as to how they got on my list.

Thanks Booklikes staff for importing everything!

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Now the books I will read in 2013 October!

Most anticipated: 

1. Allegiant by Veronica Roth!

2. When did you see her last? by Lemony Snicket

3. The Waves by Jen Minkman

The others:

1. Blythewood by Carol Goodman

2. No Angel by Helen Keeble

3. Zom-b Baby by Darren Shan

4. She is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick

5. The Waves by Jen Minkman (not yet findable)

6. Eat, Brains, Love by Jeff Hart

7. This house is Haunted by John Boyne 

8. Red by Allison Cherry

I might even read a few more books, but these are all I am looking forward to in October.

Also since it is almost Halloween (not that we celebrate that here), I will be reading a lot of horror/thriller books for the month October!