Dual timeline told in alternating chapters. Half is set in 1902 where Libbie is running a girls school with her partner Alex when a diary of a girl named Mary MacLane starts making its rounds. What follows is tragedy and creepiness. And a lot of yellow jacket wasps 😬

The other half is set in the present day where a horror movie is being made about Brookhants School's tragic past. It girl Harper Harper is one of the co-leads and is also co-producing. Aubrey is a former child star whose role in the film has suddenly changed. Merritt is the writer of the book about the original tragedy that is now the basis for this film.

So firstly this book is super queer. Like 99% of the female characters have a same sex leaning. Harper is named lesbian, Aubrey is bi, not sure what Merritt is and the historical sections introduced me to the term "Boston Marriage" wherein two women (whether romantically inclined or not) would live together in order to achieve careers and independence uncommon for the time.

I thought that it was interesting and creepy but the novel was too long (over 600 pages) and too slowly paced. A lot could have been cut in my opinion. Also the ending was very abrupt. I've seen reviews saying it could have been a duology: the historical story and then the modern one. That would allow for the detail without being overlong.

Plain Bad Heroines is the sapphic historical thriller we all needed and a surprising but welcome change from the author’s debut novel (a contemporary drama/slice of life).

Plain bad heroines had me captured from the get go. I absolutely adored the Gothic, dark and queer story and loved the unique narration. However, it did take a while to fully immerse me and it could have been slightly shorter.
All that aside, it was super whimsical and weird and just keeps it's deliciously dark claws trapped in your mind. I can't stop thinking about this book.

I was very excited to read Emily M. Danforth after loving The Miseducation of Cameron Post, but found this one to be too wordy and long-winding to get into. Which is not to say I hated it. It was weirdly enjoyable but I did wish she would get a move on!

(Review copy from NetGalley)

I loved this! The plot and characters were just *chefs kiss* sublime. The whole concept was interesting and was brilliantly executed.

I'd been wanting to read this book since it came out - I heard about it on Bookriot’s All the Books podcast and it just sounded so much fun.

Set in a girls’ school in New England, we open in 1902 when some of the students become obsessed with the memoirs of a young woman called Mary Mclean. This woman invokes the devil in her passion for sexual and personal freedoms from the norms of the day. These girls form The Plain Bad Heroines society, and are rumoured to be more than just friends. But right at the start of the book they die quite horrifically, being stung to death by a nest of yellow jacket wasps and setting off a chain of mysterious events for the school and its headmistress. Concurrently, we have a modern-day storyline, where a young girl has written a book about the goings-on at the school, heavily influenced by her relationship with the last remaining family member of that headmistress. This book is being made into a movie, directed by an enfant terrible and staring the hottest young actress on the block. Our book follows these dual timelines about what's happening at the school back in 1902 and the strange occurrences surrounding the movie production. There’s no doubt something is cursed, but is it the school, the memoirs, or something deeper?

I had the best time reading this book. Danforth has created a story with multiple layers, woven together perfectly. Let’s take the historical storyline, which is dripping with mystery and feels very of its time and place whilst showing us the relationships between women that would never have made it into print at the time. It’s heavy on the atmosphere and tension, whilst allowing the characters to come through. And then the modern storyline has a completely different feel, with characters dripping in snark whilst enjoying the freedom allowed to them in how they identify. We as readers are allowed behind the curtain of the movie production enough to feel like we know more than most characters, until it slowly dawns on us that really we know nothing. And both are shot through with this spectre of some sort of sinister influence which we can’t really pin down. The result is something that pulls you forward and keeps you guessing, and I couldn’t put it down.

This book totally lived up to my expectations – it’s just fantastic! It's dark, it's funny, it’s Sapphic as all hell...I just loved it, I really loved it.

Extraordinarily queer and bursting with style and quirky strangeness, Plain Bad Heroines is a sapphic book like no other.

In 1902, The Brookhants School for Girls has a series of strange deaths starting with Flo and Clara, two students obsessed with each other and a writer named Mary MacLane. They regularly meet in a nearby apple orchard until the pair stumble into a nest of yellow jackets and are killed by the swarm. As Mary MacLane’s book makes its way around the school, so does death and misfortune, until the school is forced to shut its gates forever. In the present, Merritt Emmons has written a book about the queer, feminist history of the Brookhants which is being turned into a movie. Harper Harper, the hottest lesbian star of Hollywood is the producer. She also plays Flo opposite B-list actress and child star Audrey Wells. The three women find themselves entangled in the gothic atmosphere of the school, unable to tell the movie from reality.

Plain Bad Heroines is a fantastically unique book with a stylised writing style that features a quirky, omniscient narrator. The slow-paced, sprawling narrative takes place over 600 pages and is entrenched with a gorgeous gothic atmosphere. One of the book’s highlights is how it demonstrates sapphic relationships throughout history in all of their messy glory. However, the pacing occasionally drags, which impacts how compelling the story is. Also, if you’re looking to understand the strange occurrences, the ending isn’t particularly satisfying. This is a book that won’t work for everyone, but if you love slow-paced reads, a gothic atmosphere, celebrity drama, and weird narrative structures, it’s worth a read

Plain bad heroines is one of the most brilliant and witty book I've read in a very long time. The writing style sucks you in the story and the characters are impossible not to love. Sapphic romance, humor, horror, this book has everything you could dream for and even more. Curses, love story, actresses and so much more in this captivating story.

Plain Bad Heroines is a weird, bold, lively and interesting novel. Two stories are interwoven; odd goings-on in a 19th century girls' boarding school, and a contemporary story of celebrities and wannabes in Los Angeles.
There's an awful lot going on in this book: lesbian love, sex, a haunted (?) house, social media, sexual consent (or not), feminism, rebellion, sexist control ... Oh I can't remember the half of it. Both timelines/stories are equally vivid and gripping.

It's a romp of a novel, a bit all over the place, uneven, but nonetheless well written and thoroughly engaging, funny, gothic and mischievous. It's overall a refreshing change from the [many] formulaic writing-by-numbers novels out there.

This is a doorstop of a book and one I found quite hard to get into but once I did I couldn’t put it down! It is a story told through multiple timelines and perspectives – all connected by the yellow jacket wasps! In 1902 two teenage girls were killed and now in the present day a film is about to be made about the deaths. There is so much more in between though – the creepy school that is now a private house, Spite Tower and all the scary wasp stories. There is something really hypnotic about the way this book is written, it really gets a grip on the reader which mirrors the effect the story has on the present day characters in the book. It made for an intense reading experience and I’m so glad I picked this book up. I really enjoyed this one and am keen to now go back and read the author’s previous novel.

This books is a masterpiece and you should read it immediately.

It is complex nuanced and beautiful in so many ways. It’s a love story, a horror story, a history and it’s truly gripping.

The characters are all flawed and awful and real in the best ways. They are surprising in the way women are surprising. Stupid in the way women are stupid and petty in the way women are petty. It is a celebration of queer women without being sweet and cloying.

I cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone who like books.

Alas, this one was not my cup of tea. It started off as something new and unique with the intricacies of the 2, 3, 4(?) interwoven threads across the different timelines and a creepy atmospheric gothic vibe, but it really didn't work for me. It was too long and the threads kept getting further and further apart instead of more cohesive to tie up plot points and storylines. Was left feeling very unsatisfied and thinking "what was the point of all that."

Thank you to Netgalley and HarperCollins for the copy.

Plain Bad Heroines follows two groups of people: women attending and running a boarding school for girls in the early 1900s, and three women who are making the film of the others' mysterious deaths. The novel cuts between these two groups of people, their unfolding relationships, and their stresses and anxieties.

The characters are all really interesting as people and I enjoyed learning more about them and growing to like them more as a result. My chief problem with this novel is that it was marketed as horror, and for me, it falls short of that mark. There were a lot of threads that I was intrigued by - the book, the curse, what happened with the poisonous flowers - and I expected more of the curse in the present. There was so much potential in a lot of these, but I felt they could all be described away without the curse. I was also expecting more about Flo and Clara in the past segments, or even in the present: they're who the film is about, and yet we don't get much more about them than the first few chapters.

It's not that I didn't enjoy this book, I just feel like it has a lot of lost potential in a world that I was left wanting to know so much more about at the end.

this book it two separate books forced into 1. Literally it’s two 300 page books of totally different narratives. I’ve never read horror before but I have been interested in getting into reading it, the 1902 narrative was more atmospheric and the characters were more interesting. I would have finished this if it was just the 1902 narrative but it’s interwoven with the modern day Hollywood narrative.
Whilst I found some aspects of the Hollywood narrative interesting, it felt very ‘scary movie’ rather than a horror and I couldn’t bare 2 of the three modern POV characters. Harper was the only one I could bare reading about. The romantic set ups were really obvious and tropey but didn’t fit the style the book was going for.
It took such a long time to start getting into any of the plot, I’m not sure it ever really does? It needed editing down and had too many characters to keep track of. There was a solid few pages about truman capote? Which i found no relevance in, and this happened a lot in both narratives.
It was very slow paced and not a lot happened in what I read and 600 pages is a lot of pages for so little to happen.
The blurb makes this sound much more gripping and interesting than it really is.

This is a really hard book to review in my opinion. I’ve since bought a physical copy of this book and will take my time with it - I’d prefer not to read this in the context of a review. I am conflicted with this story.

I was super intrigued for this novel from the blurb, and I love the yellow and pink cover so had to request!

Plain Bad Heroines took me a little while to get in to and work out where I was, but once I did I found it enjoyable and interesting and was intrigued to find out what was going to happen. I liked the characters, they all had their own voices and were really distinguishable which was definitely helpful when flicking between the past and the present.

I think however, this book could have hugely benefitted from being at least 25% shorter. It feels a lot like more is more for more's sake, rather than benefitting the actual story.

3.5 yellow jackets, rounded up.

Thanks to NetGalley, HarperCollins UK and Emily M. Danforth for an eArc copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

I found this book so hard to get into as I didn't know what was going on, it seemed quite all over the place to me. I will be trying again in the future to see if I can get into it, but I couldn't at this time.

Many thanks to the author publisher and Netgalley for a free ARC of this ebook.
What an experience this book is! The first half is nothing short of a slog, but after that the pace picks up and it's excellent. It's well worth sticking with.
Four stars

This book is told through 2 time periods, the past and the present.

If I'm being completely honest during the first half or so of this book, I was struggling to get into it. I was honestly starting to wonder if maybe this wasn't the book for me. It had everything I love in a story, but it was just hard going.

But stick it out

Because wow, the second half of the book moves quickly and so much happens.

I love the relationship between the characters in all time periods, I love that it was full of unapologetic queer romance. I loved how creepy this books as and how haunting the storyline is as well as the scene of the book.

A book for lovers of creepy stories full of queer characters.

A hauntingly, sapphic tale with twists and turns that leave you ridden with goosebumps.

I SERIOUSLY enjoyed this but I’ll be honest; the book itself is no easy read. It’s long with a hefty dose of backstory, split for us into two timelines (one of the past, one of the present.) However, if you love a challenge, this book is a really great read. Truly eerie with such beautifully written rhythm and styling that’s reminiscent almost of earlier period novels.

What surprised me the most was that this was the same author that wrote Cameron Post. I say this because whilst I enjoyed both, I felt like this was so much stronger both in writing style and storyline. Plain bad heroines has such a poetic nature to it that adds to the sheer horror of the tale. You’ll find yourself asking how can something so beautiful, be so damn terrifying.

This is a completely sapphic novel. Riddled with sapphic characters both in past and present day, which was really great to see. Whilst I wouldn’t dub this a historical style work per say, half of it is taking the reader back to a great while back, and I found it compelling. I’m not normally one for any period works having been spoon fed too much at college; yet I LOVED these moments. Perhaps it was because they were so hauntingly gripping, perhaps it was because they were so brilliantly queer. Either way I adored every moment.

What I will say is that the first 40% of the novel is a hard grind. You’re given so much information and I did feel like maybe we could have done with 100 pages less. It’s a lot of context and backstory that may not be for everyone. However if you stick with it, it’s entirely worth while.

The second half of the novel really picks up and strikes nausea so deep it settles in your bones.

*may include vague spoilers below as listing trigger warnings*

TW’s
Gore, mentions of suicide, death of a family member, death, scenes of vomiting, scenes of attempted SA (not very descriptive) , some scenes of a sexual nature (f/f based).