Ellis’ ruthless practicality next to Felicity’s hesitant, ambiguous quasi-supernatural violence makes for a foreboding combination. The juxtaposition between Felicity and Ellis is also very atmospherically interesting: Felicity is fragile, a shell of her former self, fascinated and scared of the magic she’s increasingly certain is real Ellis is a dominating force, the center of gravity at which everyone congregates, and almost disturbingly focused on her goals. The impressive bit is that the moments where Felicity is innocently reading in the common room often have just as much menace. Everything feels just slightly wrong, even in the scenes that aren’t obviously wrong of course it’s creepy when Felicity finds dried blood left over from a cryptic midnight ritual. The atmosphere is creepy and slightly suffocating. I haven’t gotten particularly deep into the dark academia, but if A Lesson in Vengeance is any indication I can see the appeal. For now, I’ll focus on what worked in the rest of the book.

I’ll get into that a bit more at the end of the review, under a spoiler heading. The ending is very disappointing: it falls into a couple of iffy tropes, it feels a bit rushed, and it lacks the emotional urgency that I was hoping for. If you’d asked me what I thought about A Lesson in Vengeance at about two-thirds of the way through, my answer would be entirely different than what it is now that I’ve read the whole thing. Felicity believes in magic-how could she not, after what happened that fated semester?-but Ellis, a new classmate and an award-winning method novelist, is committed to demonstrating to her that all of the deaths at Dalloway-both Alex’s and the historic, witchy ones that are an intrinsic part of Dalloway’s legacy-have a rational and entirely nonmagical explanation.

Now she is back at Dalloway School to finish her senior year she wants to make a new start, but she is haunted by memories of Alex… and possibly by Alex herself. I was pretty excited to read it we have similar taste in books, and if you’ve read any of my reviews you probably already know that I’m eternally questing for a great fantasy novel with sapphic characters.Īfter the traumatic, violent death of her secret girlfriend Alex, Felicity took some time off of school to recover emotionally and to put distance between herself and the rumors that she killed Alex. I told her to read All of Us Villainsby Amanda Foody and Christine Lynn Herman, and she recommended A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee.