Review: A Lesson in Vengeance
An affiliate link is included; there is no additional charge.
A Lesson in Vengeance – Victoria Lee
★
After nearly a year away, Felicity Morrow has returned to Dalloway School to finish her high school career. She lives in Godwin House, an exclusive dorm said to be haunted by five of Dalloway’s earliest students – all of them found dead under mysterious circumstances on Godwin’s grounds. Despite the administrations efforts, Dalloway’s students still engage with the school’s occult past, and before her girlfriend’s death at Dalloway the previous year, Felicity took this past very seriously. Now, she’s trying to leave it behind, but transfer student Ellis Haley won’t let her forget it. Ellis, a 17 year old writing prodigy, recruits Felicity to help her research the Dalloway Five – the inspiration for her second novel. Felicity has some misgivings about the work, concerned she’ll be drawn back into the darkness that prematurely ended her first attempt at senior year, and her uncertainty only deepens when history is starts to repeat itself.
I was pretty interested in the premise of this book. I haven’t read a lot of Gothic literature, but I love the horror genre and have been wanting to dive more into this subgenre. A Lesson in Vengeance is a really atmospheric novel. There’s an old, spooky house; eerie woods; and strange, inexplicable happenings. The setup is really intriguing, but unfortunately, it’s not built on in a meaningful way. The plot is vague at best. Things happen, but it doesn’t feel like any of it matters. I kept waiting for an inciting incident, but around the 25% mark, I realized that there wasn’t going to be anything more substantial to kick off the main plot.
It’s not inherently bad to have a loose (or even nonexistent) plot, but that only works if the characters are complex and interesting. There’s nothing distinctive about Felicity or Ellis, and neither of them has much of an arc. They’re one-dimensional and revisit the same ideas and conversations repeatedly without going anywhere new. The other girls in the school are hardly in the story at all, including the other girls living in Godwin House. Nearly everything and everyone is there spark the Felicity’s next bout of rumination about her former girlfriend, her superiority complex, or her draw to Ellis. And again, this isn’t a bad place to start for a character-driven story, but Felicity never develops. The other Godwin girls are the most prominent side characters, and it feels like they only exist because you can’t have a boarding school with only two boarders.
Ultimately, this is a book about vibes and atmosphere, not characters or plot. The atmosphere did keep me reading for quite a while before curiosity took over. Around 60% of the way through, I needed to know if anything was going to happen, and when the action did start, it was incredibly disappointing. If you’re looking for a Gothic atmosphere, this does deliver, but it doesn’t offer much more than that.
Content warnings: alcohol use/alcoholism, blood, child neglect (referenced), classism, death (animal, child, murder, ritualistic), disordered eating, emotional abuse, gore, mental illness (negative depiction), racism, toxic relationships, violence, witchcraft