An eccentric writer with a dark past leads a scarily immersive workshop for a group of teens in this unsettling and suspenseful YA dark academia novel by Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places).
Seventeen-year-old exes Effy Green and Arlo Ellis-Noon are both joining six other teens in an exclusive storytelling workshop taught by the enigmatic, infamous actor and author Meredith Graffam. The eight gifted students will spend all 16 days of Jan Term living at the Moss, the 1916 home of their school's founder, "surrounded by ten thousand acres of pristine forestland" (known colloquially as "Murder Wood" because Graffam's best friend was killed there in 1995). But Graffam's teaching style is wild, demanding her students fully trust her by standing in the middle of a busy highway with eyes shut or navigating Murder Wood alone at night. Given Graffam's troubling notoriety (she publicly lied about her friend's murderer), the teens start questioning her true intent. Graffam's "dizzying" magnetism, however, may have already immersed them in something dangerous and inescapable.
Niven's poetic prose distinctly sets the macabre scenes ("the house breathing and expanding around us like some sort of beautiful, consumptive accordion") as Graffam's facade unravels. Through Arlo's and Effy's vulnerable first-person perspectives, Graffam's insidiously divisive advice is effectively couched as genius: "The writing must always come first. Ahead of romance. Ahead of friendship"; "You are your best, most reliable resource--your only resource." Against this fractured atmosphere, the unrushed second-chance romance between Effy and Arlo amplifies the complex dynamic of who can be trusted in this intense psychological thriller. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer