Avery Curran's Spoiled Milk is a gothic boarding-school tale of suspense filled with small and large horrors, schoolgirl skirmishes, lust, death, and the supernatural.
In the fall of 1928, Emily Locke is settling into her final year at Briarley School for Girls in the English countryside as one of a tight-knit group of seven upper-sixth girls. Emily's family life is unhappy--not unusual among her year, but perhaps especially so--and Briarley has been her effective home since she was 11. Her very best friend, the girl she loves, is Violet. The book opens on Violet's 18th birthday, when the whole school celebrates and fawns over her. It is also the night that Violet dies. When the girls gather after the funeral for a midnight feast to honor her in their own way, they find that the freshest milk on the school grounds has inexplicably gone bad. These are the first clues that more change is afoot than the girls' coming-of-age.
With Violet gone, Emily and her remaining classmates determine to find out what happened--who or what killed her, and why the food at the school has begun to taste strange. They contact a medium in the village. They try a séance of their own. But the oddities and accidents at Briarley intensify, and their experiments with the spirit realm feel ever more life-and-death, until it seems that no one will get out of Briarley alive. Tensions rise for the small group of girls in this closed-room thriller, as petty rifts give way to serious terrors. Classic, but still surprising, Curran's first novel will satisfy gothic fans. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia