This book is way longer than it needs to be, and it’s all setup that fails to deliver. Early on the seeds were planted for some seriously creepy gothic chills that never materialized. The mechanics and rationale of the “curse” lacked explanation: why things manifested as they did and who was affected by the curse was muddled or absent. I listened to the audiobook, and I’m not quite sure how the narrator may have affected my opinion of the book. She had a slow, ironic drawl that seemed right in tone, like we’re all in on the same joke, but that maybe kept me from taking the whole thing seriously enough. ( )

"Plain Bad Heroines" ended up being a bit of a rollercoaster read for me - there were moments where I was deeply intrigued by what was happening, specifically in the past timeline at Brookhants, and then there would be stretches of plot that felt like a chore to get through. It's been awhile since I've read a book that is so interesting but so boring all at the same time.

The main strength of PBH lies in its come-hither promise of a darkly delicious story about a cursed school, queer actors, and a little red book that prompted young women to diverge from the beaten path. Especially in the first 200 pages of the novel Danforth weaves the past and the present so wonderfully, and each timeline hints at all these mysterious going-on's in a very tantalizing way that made me want to keep turning pages.
The characters were ones I never really connected to, but I did root for some of them more than others. Audrey and Alex I heavily empathized with and wanted them to succeed in any way they could. On the other hand, Merritt is one of the most obnoxiously irritating characters to exist and I couldn't stand her. I'm fairly certain she was meant to be unlikable for a portion of the novel, and in that sense she was very well-written, but even to the last page I was annoyed by her. Harper felt very flat and everything she did became repetitive, which in turn made her dull to read. I thought her plot was going to be a bit more flashy yet remained predictable.

Which leads to the weaknesses of the book, namely, failure to deliver on the promise of a terrifying tale. The book sets itself up like chaos and darkness are going to descend in the present plot but instead it all just gets dragged out to the extreme. It's over halfway through the book before the present story finally makes its way to Brookhants, and when we're finally there so little really happens! It's more yellow jackets and angst and malfunctioning film equipment, none of which is actually scary. The past plotline also becomes more difficult to enjoy because it feels very low-stakes, and again, becomes repetitive. We see the same kind of horror (yellow jackets, slimy water, physical injury) over and over and over again and it's simply ineffective.
Finally, the ending: when a book is over 600 pages and keeps making big promises, but delivers a weak, uninspired, and too-many-questions-left-unanswered ending, it's bound to be a little bit of a disappointment. It's not a terrible ending, just a boring one.

TL;DR: Parts of this book are enjoyable, even funny, and the writing is strong, but the plot drags too much and doesn't deliver on the promise of terror - also yellow jackets can only be scary once or twice before it feels like a forced motif being slammed over the readers head. ( )

I adored this book. So many different stories, but I never once felt lost. It all went seamlessly together. What a lyrical, terrifying story. ( )

Spooky multigenerational queer romance? With period piece subplots?! Don’t mind if I do! ( )

[3.75]

I had to sleep on this one before I wrote a review. It's safe to say that I absolutely loved 85% of this book. Once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. I truly loved ALL the characters in both timelines. I loved the sapphic joy (and sapphic longing) and I loved how drenched in tension everything was.

What I didn't love was how most of the storylines wrapped up. It seems almost absurd to say a 600+ page book rushed the ending, but that is truly how it felt. The last 50-60 pages felt like a slightly messy info dump (with time jumps) just to wrap up everything we just spend hundreds of pages building up to.

The publisher probably wouldn't agree, but I would have happily read another 200 pages for this to feel complete. ( )

For the majority of this, I could have made it a 4 star, it definitely had the makings of it. I loved parts of it, Alex and Libbie were amazing, Audrey and Merritt were great, Elaine was fabulous, Harper was a caricature and the rest of them were not really memorable.
There was one part that gave me chills, and that’s why I landed at 3.25 stars.
It was just too long in the end. Had it been 300 pages, I think it would have more readership and be received better. ( )

This was for the Lesbian book club and it was LONG. Otherwise, OK, but not my favorite. It's one of those books with a contemporary and an older storyline, the older story line is about a group of women and girls in a Rhode Island Boarding School in 1902-ish; the contemporary story involves 2 actresses, one a young lesbian social media phenomenon named Harper Harper, and a young writer who had written a book about the boarding school. I found myself more drawn to the more recent story. The 1900's characters seemed pretty 2 dimensional.

It got mixed reviews in the book group, but some folks REALLY liked it, so if it sounds good to you, give it a try. ( )

i was utterly in the thrall of this book. this sort of book isn't normally "my thing" but i was so taken with this. it took me a handful of pages to really fall in, but once i did, i was so gripped by it.

it is so beautifully queer, in all the possible ways. both the historical sections and the present day sections had so much to speak for them - and they were both so different, even while being fundamentally the same - that i found it so fun to go back and forth between them. (and i had no idea, until the acknowledgments, that the book and the author referenced was an actual book and author; i'd assumed she was made up, so that's fun, too.) the tension in the historical section felt like this overwhelming forboding of something that was going to happen to alex or to libbie or to them both. the tension in the present day section felt much different, like maybe the women would blow up at each other for the secret-keeping, but also the building sexual tension between them was intense and made for a fun read. (especially between merritt and harper.)

i'm sure i'm in the minority but i loved loved loved the footnotes in this. give me all the books of fiction with footnotes, and make them just like this. this faux historical text that gives us both extra information and also asides to readers in the footnotes, that draws us in like we are being told some of the secrets that are rife in this book, making us more a part of it. i really, really loved this aspect. i'm sure it might have been too much for some, though.

and i can see how the historical portion, which is crucial to the development of the hauntings, is less developed than it should be. we don't really know those characters well; they're much less full than the present day trio of women felt to me. and along those lines, the tie up of it all probably should have been longer. the story of the rash brothers - the real story - was so good and could have been 5 times as long without taking much more space, but could have been explored more fully.

still, what an ambitious and fun novel and a great introduction to this author.

"Isn't that what the swell of a crush is, after all? Recognizing the flush of truth in all the love clichés?"

"All around her, she saw young women like herself striking out as originals. And she wanted to be one, too.*
*It is perhaps worth asking, Readers, if one is truly an original if one only seeks to be so in the likeness of other originals." ( )

I thought some eerie-gothic would be a nice change, and this was a good choice. Those looking for plot-heavy twisty stories will probably be disappointing, but this book wins for atmosphere, tension and wonderful characterization. I really enjoyed the centering of so many complex women. ( )

I really liked this book and it's difficult to explain why. Sometimes you just vibe with a book and you don't even know why you're so into it. This book is a story within a story. I found it similar to AHS: Roanoke, where there is the movie (or in the case of AHS, I think it was a tv show) being filmed, and then snippets of the past and what actually happened. I thought it worked really well and I actually went out and bought a physical copy halfway through reading it. I never do that because I have loved a book up until near the end where it goes completely downhill, luckily that didn't happen with this book! ( )

I don't know what this was, but I enjoyed it. Even more so because it's queer af. Is there a single hetero character? I honestly can't remember.

More thoughts later after I've gotten Ruth to read it and we've discussed it. ( )

I think my expectations were waaaay too high for this one. I don't know. I mostly sort of enjoyed the book but could have probably done completely without the contemporary component. I mean, it seemed overly long and I just don't get the point of spending so much time in the current era with the movie. And soooo many characters and twists. It was really too many for me.

I read the ebook and listened to the audiobook, sometimes together. Which reminds me about how much the footnotes irritated me. Having to tap and have the footnote pop up was irritating and the reading of the instagram posts in the audiobook - ugh. I know it sounds petty but there were so many.

I'm not sure if the time spent was worth the payoff for me.

We picked Plain Bad Heroines as the March book on Cocktail Hour and I'm excited to discuss it with Andy and Colette. ( )

5+ out of 5.
Absolutely fantastic -- this book has big NIGHT FILM energy but also weaves in a time-hopping story that never drags, never feels too long even at just-over-600 pages, and genuinely packs a spooky punch to boot. The book feels vivid and fresh and like it blurs the lines between reality and fiction in the best possible ways, leaving the book as an inhabitant in your mind long after you've put it down. There's a sense of my world now including Bo Dhillon's film and real people called Harper and Audrey and Merritt, in the same way that I want to see a Cordova film or I'm curious to see if Tuesday Mooney might pop across the street in front of me the next time I'm in Boston.

Fucking great stuff.

I loved the stories of all these queer women, and the gothic atmosphere aspect of the 1902 storyline. The ominous narrator works very well in the time period, as the book passes around the school and haunts people.
In the modern day, however, it felt a bit out of place and made those chapters drag. ( )

I'd say "don't read this while sick" but honestly? Maybe just skip this one ( )

Xe Sands is the perfect narrator for this dual-timeline, Gothic horror audiobook! It's a long one (19 hours) but it sucks you in. Creeping horror, movie-making, layered storytelling -- will look for more by this author. ( )

I wanted to love this book, Readers, truly I did. But I did not. There is a satisfying little ghost story toward the end--two, in fact--but the slog it took to get there. My god. It truly pains me that I ended up hate-reading this book. Danforth's writing is so much fun.* But too much of a good thing is still too. fucking. much.

*With the exception of the absolutely unnecessary and entirely distracting footnotes. They were no fun at all. ( )

I never like to admit defeat when the book is an Early Reviewer book. And I really did try to finish this one -- several times. Once I managed to get almost a third of the way through before my attention started giving out. I just never could stay interested long enough to get any further. Maybe I'm just the wrong audience for the book. So I have to apologize to the author and publisher and LT's Early Reviewer program, but I'm throwing in the towel on this one. Could not finish it and don't intend to rate it.

COOL OKAY I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS IN MY BODY AND I’M GONNA NEED AT LEAST A WEEK TO FIGURE THEM ALL OUT.

I think this book was written directly for me to hit like, most of my buttons, and I’m FURIOUS about it and I need to own this book immediately. ( )

This is a novel that doesn't quite live up to its promise. The dialogue never quite gels, the foundation of the scary story feels unstable to me, and the pacing seems unnecessarily slow and bogged down with parenthetical asides and footnotes. I read the whole book (combo of audio and hardcover) but was never able to get into the story enough to get scared. I wish the audiobook narrator had sung the school songs to the tune described in the book. ( )

The story idea and delivery were good but the book its self was just too wordy. The same good story could have been told and been just as good in about 100 less pages. The tale went back and forth from 1900 to modern day with alternate viewpoints by different characters present during that time period. I also don’t understand why it’s deemed a “horror” novel. Maybe it is if you’re 12 years old but it loses the creep factor for adults. I believe the author was trying to connect the strange occurrences taking place during the filming of the movie being made at the school and what happened on the site in the early 1900 events. Something was lost in the time spans. The book seems to have two themes; one about the proposed supernatural events and the other about being gay. It would have been better if one theme or the other was the main event. ( )

This book has two related plotlines: one centers on a Victorian-era girls' boarding school in New England, where many of the girls are obsessed with a book that encourages them to have lesbian relationships. The school's headmistress is lesbian, and encourages the girls to read the book. However, the school is best by a series of tragedies, starting when one of the girls disturbs a wasp nest and is killed by wasps. That tragedy and the ones following it all seem to be related to the book. The other storyline takes place in the present day, when a production company makes a movie about the events at the boarding school. The production is beset with problems, raising questions about whether the school is cursed.

There are a lot of characters in this book, which makes it overly complicated, and it can be hard to keep track of all the characters. Most of them are well-developed and interesting, but the time it takes to develop all of those characters makes the book move slowly. There are also a lot of different themes to the curse: the book, women loving women, wasps, fruit, greenhouses, old houses, unseasonal snow. It's not surprising that after building up all of these complicated characters and hauntings, the end of the book is really unsatisfying - there are just too many threads to be able to pull them all together. ( )

This is one of those books that you read the blurb for it without realizing it cannot prepare you in any way for what’s to come. Then you start reading it and discover it has so many layers and levels and works perfectly on all of them! For once you can believe the hype. Added bonus are the cool black and white illustrations and footnotes! You will be tempted but don't skip the footnotes! ( )

This Alex Award winner is not immediately easy to summarize. It's in some ways a fictional history of a curse that surrounds a Rhode Island boarding school for girls, starting with the strange deaths of two students in the early 1900s. It's also an intertwining of several different narratives which move back and forth through time; one involving the two women who founded the school and the strange events that led to the school's beginnings and the tragedies that happened there, another set in the present day and following three young women as they play their parts in a movie being made - based on a book one of them wrote - about those tragedies, with a few smaller but related stories woven in as well. All these women feel the pull of the place and of the curse in various ways, and by the end all the pieces fall into their places in an intricate and satisfying pattern. Nearly all the women in the story are either gay or bi, and the theme of lesbianism-as-curse is threaded through the story beautifully. It's not heavy-handed and it doesn't feel as if sexuality makes the rest of the plot take a back seat, but instead it is both an important part of the story and also seamlessly included. Overall, a very cool story - very creepy in parts but never outright scary - very well told. ( )

It was fine. Not fantastic, not terrible. ( )