The Divines review

 Hello Interwebs!

So here's another book review for you. This one is for The Divines by Ellie Eaton. I read this book from June 18 to June 20 and gave it a rather disappointed 3 stars. 

This book is one that I decided to read after my try a chapter decision making and the beginning hooked me very quickly. By the end I wish that the author had stuck with only the past parts of the book instead of Josephine's present as well. I'm still rather confused by the ending but it was still fine. Definitely a 3/5 star book. 

As always spoilers after the picture. 

So the Divines is about an elite boarding school for girls called St. John the Divine where our narrator, Josephine, attended as did her female relatives on her mother's side. You learn early on that something happened fifteen years before the present day that resulted in a girl falling (or jumping or being pushed) from an upstairs window and the school closing following a scandal. The novel splits between present day Josephine, called Sephine by her new husband, and the Josephine of fifteen years ago (called Jo by the Divines) as she reminisces back to her school days and what led up to the scandal. I was left feeling, unfulfilled. Teenager Jo was an awful person as were the rest of the Divines, they were snotty stuck-up self-important girls with no accountability to anyone. Jo starts up a friendship with one of the townies, a girl named Lauren who turns out to be a lesbian in love with her. Jo treats her as less than through the whole friendship and plays with her affections as well as her brother, who is in a relationship with a child he sees as his own. Present day Jo, you are led to believe, has moved past her time as a Divine and hasn't been back aside from the initial brief stop on her way through while on her honeymoon but as you get more modern day Jo you realize that she hasn't changed at all and it made me hate her all the more both asthe snotty teenager and as the adult who learned exactly nothing from her past. Then you reach the ending and realize that events didn't happen the way she is narrating them: that she was a ringleader among the Divines, not an outsider; that she was the main bully for her roommate who didn't die in the fall but was severely injured. You realize in a couple conversations with people from the past that she was the worst of the worst and rewrote her story to make herself the victim in her story instead of the villain. And there the story ends, no closure, no hope for a better person, no reconciliation with her estranged husband, and no indications that she plans to break this cycle with her own daughter. 

This story was unsatisfying in the extreme and I wish it had been written only in that past sections, maybe as a strict thriller framed by present Jo telling the story of her past without the drama in her present. I'm imagining the book written similarly to The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware where the meat of the story is the thriller in the past but it's written by the narrator in the present as letters to her solicitor. I wasn't very invested in adult Jo's story and I wish the story had been a normal thriller told in a single timeline when she was a teenager. 

All in all I didn't hate the book but it will definitely be far from my favorite of the year. I think I'll stay with my 3/5 star rating but that's probably actually more like a 2.5 rating. So that's my thoughts on The Divines, it could've been better but I've also read much, much worse. 

Happy Reading!

Richelle