Khanh the Killjoy

This book is by Carol Goodman. I didn't realize until I went and looked up the book after starting it tonight, and no wonder the writing felt so familiar. It turns out I've read a lot of her books, like The Lake of Dead Languages, and the Fairwick Chronicles, under a pseudonym.

The book is messy. The heroine (Ava) is too much. She works at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (and we all know how well THAT turns out for her). Her mother just died.

I swear to god, the most dangerous profession in the world is not that of a bomb squad technician. It is to be a parent or a sibling of a young woman in YA fiction, because mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers. They DIE. THEY ALL DIE.

Her mother is the daughter of a wealthy society woman, who ran away after becoming pregnant while at prestigious school Blythewood. After her mother's death, Ava is lockerd up in a mental hospital, then wakes up to find out that she's been taken into the care of her very rich, very bitchy grandmother.

She's now newly enrolled in Blythewood. There's a Order of the Bells.

The reader is clubbed on the head with bells and bird imagery. It is so, so, so overwrought with imagery, you cannot imagine. The girls in this school are fucking morons, I would be screaming GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE if I went through what they did. They don't question a single fucking thing.

Purple prose. Much purple prose.

Oh, insta-love. Love triangle. DING DING DING.

And I'm only 30% in.

Mommy.