'Felicity Morrow is back at Dalloway School. Perched in the Catskill mountains, the centuries-old, ivy-covered campus was home until the tragic death of her girlfriend. Now, after a year away, she’s returned to graduate. She even has her old room in Godwin House, the exclusive dormitory rumored to be haunted by the spirits of five Dalloway students—girls some say were witches. The Dalloway Five all died mysteriously, one after another, right on Godwin grounds.
'Witchcraft is woven into Dalloway’s history. The school doesn’t talk about it, but the students do. In secret rooms and shadowy corners, girls convene. And before her girlfriend died, Felicity was drawn to the dark. She’s determined to leave that behind her now; all Felicity wants is to focus on her senior thesis and graduate. But it’s hard when Dalloway’s occult history is everywhere. And when the new girl won’t let her forget.
'It’s Ellis Haley’s first year at Dalloway, and she’s already amassed a loyal following. A prodigy novelist at seventeen, Ellis is a so-called “method writer.” She’s eccentric and brilliant, and Felicity can’t shake the pull she feels to her. So when Ellis asks Felicity for help researching the Dalloway Five for her second book, Felicity can’t say no. Given her history with the arcane, Felicity is the perfect resource. And when history begins to repeat itself, Felicity will have to face the darkness in Dalloway–and in herself.'
I'd only recently heard of the term dark academia, having stumbled across a video essay that explained this fairly new,and popular, genre. As far as I was aware, I'd not actually read any books that were expressly described as being dark academia; though there are definitely a few that skirt close to it. But A Lesson in Vengeance is a book that as soon as I heard about it people were throwing that phrase around; and as such I was really looking forward to finally experiencing this popular genre.
A Lesson in Vengeance begins by introducing us to Felicity Morrow, a young woman who has returned to college following a long break the previous year for so far unspecified reasons. We get hints that it was something bad that happened to her, but not much else at this point. Felicity attends the Dalloway School, and lives in the centuries old Godwin house; a small building dating back to the 1700's that played home to five young women who were accused of being witches, and who died in strange and tragic circumstances. The Dalloway Five.
Expecting to be the only person at Godwin house this early, Felicity is surprised to find another student there, Ellis Haley. Ellis is in her first year at Dalloway, and is a world famous author at only seventeen. Whilst Felicity initially takes a dislike to her, and the way the other girls at Godwin house flock around her, the two of them begin to grow close. Eventually, Ellis asks Felicity for hep writing her next novel, a story about the Dalloway Five. The two of them begin to plan out how someone could have committed these historic murders, making it look like the work of magic. But Felicity begins to unlock suppressed memories of the tragic events that took place the previous year, and begins to think that she may be quite literally haunted by the ghosts of what happened.
A Lesson in Vengeance is a mystery thriller book, with some possible supernatural elements thrown in to have the reader question if something more than ordinary might be going on. You'll spend a lot of time reading this book learning small snippets of information about Felicity's past, trying to piece together what happened to her and her girlfriend, Alex; as well as watching as Felicity and Ellis grow close in the present.
There feels like there's a lot of balls up in the air when reading this book, a lot of things to keep track of and to watch out for as you juggle small clues, vague hints, and outright disinformation. Because of this, I often found it hard to fully invest in what was happening. There were more and a few times where we'd be given a piece of information as fact, and then several pages later we'd be told it was an outright lie. I suspect that this was done both for dramatic effect, and possibly to show the mental health issues that Felicity was dealing with; but I would sometimes feel like a bit of a cheat to me. For example, I don't know what we gained from Felicity giving us a completely fabricated version of events, which was immediately proven to be false. I don't know why we were made to believe something was real before it was quickly revealed to be fake, other than to perhaps make us not believe anything that Felicity was seeing.
If this was, in fact, an attempt to have the reader begin to doubt the sincerity of the narrator, I didn't like this method. It's not someone starting to question if maybe they imagined seeing a ghost, or questioning if maybe their recollection could be slightly off; this was the narrator giving us an openly false narrative that was nothing like reality, which then immediately made me doubt anything that had come before it. I wasn't jut questioning if what was happening now was false, but if anything in the entire book was even real; and this effected how I thought about what I'd already read in a negative way. It's difficult to write about mental health, and certain issues are going to be harder to convey, but I just found that Felicity creating this entirely different version of events made her completely untrustworthy, and broke some of my enjoyment of the book.
The other main protagonist for the book, and only other real character, is Ellis. Ellis is seventeen, a published author who has received a Pulitzer, has been on the cover of Time Magazine, and has more wild stories than someone three times her age. And there's my biggest issue with her right off the bat. Ellis is a character who cannot, should not, be seventeen. I know it might not sound very generous of me, but her level of achievement, her fame and fortune and skill at just seventeen feel completely and utterly unbelievable. These feelings were only compound by the way she acted. She spends long periods locked in her room writing, but when she comes out she's introducing girls older than her to different whiskey drinks, she'd driving around to old antique shops, and she's staring off into the distance with a look of angst on her face. She's a thirty-five-year-old trapped in a teenage body. The fact that we also get this ridiculous horror story like backstory for her doesn't help either, as her entire character began to feel like walking tropes rather than a real human being.
This was something that I found with all of the characters if I'm being honest, they all came across like people twice their age, and none of them felt like teens at all. I know some people complain about how immature protagonists in YA books are because they're kids, but if these characters were stated to be in their thirties but nothing else was changed it wouldn't feel out of place at all. Perhaps its just that each and every one of them was pretentious, attending this old college, dressing in tweeds and plaids that seem to have come off a dark academia mood board, talking about how difficult their privileged lives are, discussing old classics like they should shape the way people view the world. Yes, it might be ticking all the boxes for fans of dark academia, but it resulted in teens who felt like they were trying too hard to be adults, and came across as very false.
In addition to Ellis being this super special 'greatest writer of her generation' at seventeen we had a similar thing with Alex, Felicity's ex. Alex, who I believe was also seventeen at the time of her death, was an Olympic athlete who'd climbed Everest twice already and was the second youngest person in the world to do so. Whilst I know that there are young Olympians, and that the youngest person to climb Everest was thirteen, this just felt like another example of the main characters needing to be super special wonder people. I don't know how she does it, but Felicity seems to only attract the greatest people of her age. Perhaps this is another reason why everyone in this book feels so rich and privileged that I couldn't really connect with them.
The romance between both Felicity and Alex in the past, and Felicity and Ellis in the present both felt super toxic to me too. I know that you don't have to write happy relationships in books, and that there are toxic relationships in the world; but boy does it seem like Felicity can't pick a decent person to give her love to. It just comes across like both of the main f/f relationships in the novel feature abusive elements, and this just gets further compounded in the epilogue section where Felicity casually mentions wanting to leave her loving girlfriend because she doesn't quite fit her vibe. The book ends with her dating this lovely lady, having dinner with her, and pages before she was going 'she's not really the cool kind of girl I want, so I'm just gonna leave her'. It really seems like Felicity is a toxic woman who shouldn't be dating anyone.
Outside of Felicity and Ellis, and talk about Alex, there aren't really any real characters in the book. There are three other housemates that live in Godwin, but I couldn't tell you their names let alone what they're like as they're so forgettable. These other three only seem to appear when the plot needs them to, and do the barest minimum before leaving again. The book could have cut half the scenes they were in and you wouldn't really notice their absence as they bring nothing to the table.
I really wanted to like A Lesson in Vengeance, I wanted to get invested in this story and the characters, but I found so little of either actually in the pages. What was there felt too disconnected, too heavily reliant on exaggerated tropes and 'vibes' to get by, and often came across more like a pastiche. Perhaps I'm simply the wrong audience for this, I'm sure there will be people who will lap up the dark academia theme, who will dig the characters and love the romance and mystery; but I'm not one of them.
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