The Divines

by Ellie Eaton

With the emotional power of Normal People and the reflective haze of The Girls, a magnetic novel that moves between present-day Los Angeles and a British boarding school in the 1990s, exploring the destructive relationships between teenage girls.

Can we ever really escape our past?

The girls of St John the Divine, an elite English boarding school, were notorious for flipping their hair, harassing teachers, chasing boys, and chain-smoking cigarettes. They were fiercely loyal, sharp-tongued, and cuttingly humorous in the way that only teenage girls can be. For Josephine, now in her thirties, the years at St John were a lifetime ago. She hasn’t spoken to another Divine in fifteen years, not since the day the school shuttered its doors in disgrace.

Yet now Josephine inexplicably finds herself returning to her old stomping grounds. The visit provokes blurry recollections of those doomed final weeks that rocked the community. Ruminating on the past, Josephine becomes obsessed with her teenage identity and the forgotten girls of her one-time orbit. With each memory that resurfaces, she circles closer to the violent secret at the heart of the school’s scandal. But the more Josephine recalls, the further her life unravels, derailing not just her marriage and career, but her entire sense of self.

Suspenseful, provocative, and compulsively readable, The Divines is a scorching examination of the power of adolescent sexuality, female identity, and the destructive class divide. Exposing the tension between the lives we lead as adults and the experiences that form us, Eaton probes us to consider how our memories as adults compel us to reexamine our pasts.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Dark Academia, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Historical Fiction, Adult

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 19, 2021

About the author

Ellie Eaton is a freelance writer, whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Observer and Time Out. Former Writer-in-Residence at a men’s prison in the UK, she holds an MA in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London and was awarded a Kerouac Project residency. Born and raised in England, she now lives in Los Angeles with her family. The Divines is her first novel.

Reviews

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 *

This book seems to be a little hard to review and I can see I'm not the only one thinking this. It is a debut book that I think is beautifully written and pretty smart. I listened to the audiobook. The narrator is exceptional.

The story alternates from past to present time. In the past, Josephine attended a boarding school in England during her teenage years. The school was St. John The Divine and the girls called themselves, "Divines." It is a boarding school for the privileged that many of the girls Mothers and Grandmothers also attended. The girls all go by "boys" names. So Josephine was always known as "Jo." There is conflict with the outside class known as the "townies." Also many teenage issues in this book from sexuality, bullying, and weight-issues.

In the present day Jo is now married and has a child. She is struggling with things that happened while she was in school. She later attends a reunion at the school and comes face-to-face with some classmates. It seems she recalls things differently than her other classmates did.

The opening scene of the book is dramatic and leaves you wondering. There is a bit of a mystery to this story but it takes a bit for it to develop and before you know it you are immersed! I think Ellie Eaton's writing is very promising. The ending was not what I would have expected but it leaves you really thinking about the whole story.

I'd like to kindly thank NetGalley and Harper Audio for providing me access of this Advanced recording.

[Olive Fellows (abookolive) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like many readers, I'm a sucker for a good campus novel, so when I saw the premise of "The Divines" by Ellie Eaton on NetGalley, I couldn't press request fast enough (thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for the review copy).

The book starts off well enough. In her adult years, our main character Josephine returns back to the town where her former boarding school used to stand. The passing of time has brought about a number of changes: the buildings that used to make up the school have either been flattened or repurposed and Josephine is newly married - she's actually on her honeymoon. There are some things that haven't changed, however. A local to this town catches on that Josephine attended that school, St. John the Divine, and the two have a quite disconcerting encounter. The reader starts to catch on that the "townies" and the school girls, known as "Divines" didn't exactly get along back in the day. We also learn that there was a reason Josephine has been distancing herself from her past for the last 15 or so years.

Eaton splits the narrative between Josephine's new adult life with her husband and the story of what happened when she was known as "Joe" (the Divines all take boy names as nicknames). We're led to believe that there was a massive scandal at the end of the school year and that one girl - Joe's roommate, Gerry - had a tragic accident. In the meantime, there's a mystery of someone leaving lewd photos around campus for the girls to find and an unlikely friendship that develops between Joe and a "townie," Lauren.

Again, a strong premise that's assisted by some really nice writing. But as the book went along, the story got progressively weaker. The side characters - with maybe the exception of Lauren - didn't have much to them and the tension didn't really build, nor resolve into anything. In my humble opinion, the best part of a campus novel is a growing sense of dread as you get closer to the ~~bad thing that happened ~~ at the school.

But I just didn't feel it in this book and I can't figure out why the author would have made the "modern" Josephine sections so frequent, since all they did was yank me out of the boarding school story. The extreme mismatch in pacing between the school sections (which seem to take place over one semester) and the adult Josephine section (which spans actual years) was so jarring. The cherry on top was the plot twist actually being a plot hole.

I'm willing to read more from this author because it's clear she has writing skills, but this story was a mess.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed The Divines. It is a coming of age novel where the main character experienced every possible problem imaginable. The story also discusses Jo’s problems in adulthood. The Divines really focuses on what happened in the past and how that affects Jo in the present.

There are so many lies and rules broken in The Divines. The girls all go by nicknames that could be boy’s names. Jo experiments with her sexuality. The girls have their first sexual experiences. Drinking, smoking, sex, and the morning after pill are all present in The Divines.

The Divines is an enjoyable book that teaches the reader about human nature at the same time. Sometimes instead of learning from their mistakes, people are haunted by their past.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Imogen Church and loved her narration. Imogen is one of my favorite narrators and she did a great job narrating The Divines.

Full Review: https://justreadingjess.wordpress.com...

[DeAnn · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Complex Boarding School Stars

This complex story is difficult to categorize, it’s a bit coming-of-age, escaping the past, and with a bit of a mystery thrown in. This debut novel really got me thinking about perception and reality and how we reconcile ourselves with the past.

There are two storylines, one is set at a boarding school in England, St. John the Divine, and features the privileged girls who are students and call themselves The Divines. There is a long history and legacy with mothers and grandmothers attending the school as well. This storyline was a bit uncomfortable to read, there is the rivalry with the Townies, the level of cruelty between the girls, and the lack of discipline from the teachers. There is definitely a hierarchy at the school and the author builds a bit of mystery around events that happened. Josephine, or Joe, is the main character. It was interesting that all the girls had nicknames that were boys’ names and had perfected the flip of hair that marked them as Divine. Joe seems to feel like she was frequently left out of things at school, especially when she had a roommate who was outside the circle of popular girls.

The other storyline is set in Los Angeles, 15 years later, and more about Joe trying to make sense of her school years now that she is a wife and mother. The past seems to be haunting her present self and she ends up at a school reunion confronting many of the perceptions she has about her school years. She seems to remember herself and events differently than the other women.

At the end of the book, I was left wondering if you can really change? Can you make up for things you’ve done in your past or can some things never be forgiven? While I didn’t like Josephine, she was an interesting character!

Thank you to Book Club Girls/William Morrow and NetGalley for the copy of this one to read and reivew.

[Kim ~ It’s All About the Thrill · Rating 4 out of 5]

The young...the privileged...the Divines...One might argue that these girls of St John the Divine boarding school simply refer to themselves as "The Divines" because that is the name of their school. However it appears to be way more than that....they truly think of themselves as ...well divine ...a cut above the rest ... they have been sent packing by their family and have bonded together like no other. It's them against the world.

I really enjoyed the past and present timeline. As Josephine has an upcoming school reunion .. she becomes obsessed with her past. The relationships ..the scandal ...that horrible night ..that continues to haunt her.

It begs to question ...do we remember everything correctly from our youth? Or have we molded our memories to protect ourselves? A story of growing up ... mistakes made ..coming of age. The chain smoking ..hair flipping girls ..started out as a slow burn read that built into an addictive page turner.

Something I found extremely interesting was the mention that Josephine may be experiencing Boarding School Syndrome. I googled this and ...well Dr. Google says it is indeed a real thing!

For some reason I have a fascination with boarding school premise books! I don't know ...I just do. The more privileged and mean ..well the more I enjoy it. I am a bit obsessed and need to read them all! Do you find yourself drawn to the boarding school books too?

Thank you to William Morrow and Bibliolifestyle for this gorgeous gifted copy! :)

[Sunny Lu · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book blew me away in its presentation of girlhood to motherhood, the viciousness of youth to the monotony of adult life, and the exploration of themes of trauma, memory, perspective, feminism, queerness, and class, all within the immersive and disorienting alternating settings of a snobby English all girls boarding school and meandering adult life.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to give a rating to The Divines, a book I didn't exactly enjoy reading but found coldly compelling with its woven, tangled psychological drama-mystery of the teenage girls from boarding school St John the Divine. We follow the narrator, Josephine, (Joe while at school, Sephine in her adult life after shedding the Divine from her life) as she uncovers, recalls, processes who she was, who she is, and what happened all those years ago, flipping back and forth between her school days and her present life. Eaton tackles material that often comes up in the coming of age young girl tale - exploring sexuality, toxic friendship, mean girls, cliques, isolation and loneliness and the pathological need to belong for some - and leans into some of the darker, crueler aspects of the teenage girl experience.

What's clever is Eaton doesn't only do this: she also is really focused on perception and reality, the visions and versions of these girls and then women that they create, recreate, recall, to fit in, to fit out, to protect themselves from trauma, to transcend what trauma was inflicted upon them or that they dished out to others. We see Josephine through a broken carnival mirror, getting parts of her that make a whole but is also distorted somehow: the Joe she thinks she is as Divine, the Joe the other girls see and interact with, the Sephine she's created to break from her past and reinvent herself, and the Sephine that still has Joe lurking within her and cannot break away. Eaton often has little mirrors for her characters spliced in the narrative - one Divine character becomes a child psychologist trauma specialist yet the confrontation of the trauma at Divine is revealing. It's smart, sharp, and unnerving to read. Reading it is a bit like handling something beautiful, broken, and dangerous: it's not an entirely pleasurable experience and perhaps it brings up painful reminders of what it was to be that teenage girl, but you appreciate it and its craftsmanship even though it's uncomfortable.

My only complaint - because cruel, selfish but interestingly flawed, vulnerable, compelling characters don't stop me really liking something - is that the pacing seemed off and the ending, while making a degree of thematic sense, seemed very undercooked. After a creepy prologue, the book unfolds fairly slowly and it takes longer than it should to understand the lingo and set the scene and stakes. But then it starts moving as we see Sephine unraveling her past and a bit herself in the present while also being transported to a building tension between Joe in her past relationships, with Skipper and the Divine girls, with Gerry, with Lauren, with Stuart. But then, at the climax - the reveal of the scandal and a reunion of sorts - I felt as though we were left wanting more, that the confrontations and discussions and reflections from Sephine or other characters were not enough. I was left deeply unsatisfied by the ending...

And yet I think this was part of Eaton's point, stretching that discomfort, that dissatisfaction, that prickly, looming guilt and disgust and anxiety and titillation across the full range of the novel. When does something end? When we choose for it to? Maybe, but it's been a few hours and I can't quite shake the unnerving feeling I had reading this book. It lingered, and not in ways I necessarily liked or enjoyed, but I still marvel at the force of it. And that mirrors how Eaton's characters are dealing with their own endings and becomings and pasts. I don't even know if I can recommend this book, but I'd hope that if the blurb and this somewhat bizarre review have intrigued you, you give it a try. 4 stars and I will be both eagerly and anxiously awaiting and dreading future books by Ellie Eaton.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teenage girls are cruel, and “The Divines” by Ellie Eaton is an almost horror story about a group of privileged boarding school-girls. Eaton writes so well that I got stomach-aches reading this novel. This coming-of-age story garnered a big buzz and lots of press. It’s deserved. The tone, emotions, and cruel shenanigans ring true, uncomfortably true.

The story line is a prior student, Sephine, is drawn back to her now defunct boarding school. Her mother, also an alumnus of the same girls boarding school insists that she attends a big all-class reunion. Sephine is now in her 30’s, married with a child and residing in Los Angeles. Her mother still lives in England and wants Sephine to return. This triggers Sephine into vague and sometimes vivid memories of her years at the school.

These wealthy girls were horrible. Sephine knows this and now must face those facts. An unfortunate event involving her roommate is the plot point that drives the story. I do hope that Eaton doesn’t know of such a school that tolerated such horrible behavior.

I did enjoy how Eaton ended her story. This is her debut novel, and I look forward to more work from her.

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5 Stars

I'm always looking for novels with a dark academia feel since I find them very intriguing and enjoy reading them. I must say this one kind of fell flat to me. I would say that the only dark academia part was the setting which is a boarding school in England, but in regards to academics there really wasn't much, which for me was just a shame.
Some of the characters did have some interesting storylines, but in the end it all felt quite inconclusive. The parts set at boarding school were okay, but sometimes I just didn't stand or care for these girls. I was hoping that the chapters set in the present would offer some big revelations, but it was all a bit boring actually. The ending especially was a bit anticlimactic in my opinion, I was expecting something more.

[Lilith Black Bee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good, but that ending though?! Very disappointing! Besides, am I the only one that wonders what really happened, did Jo imagined some of the things or not?! 🤔

[Elizabeth (Plant Based Bride) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have so many mixed feelings about this book.

For the first 90% of the novel I was convinced this just wasn’t for me. I was struggling to connect to the story or invest in the characters. I felt frustrated and angry at Jo for her cowardice and pettiness. Her lack of empathy and depth. Until the very end. The ending, while perhaps a bit vague for my taste, was intriguing enough to change my perception of all of the chapters proceeding it.

First of all, I listened to this as an audiobook and the narrator, Imogen Church, is just wonderful. Even through the earlier portion of the book, as I struggled to find the purpose of what I was reading, I loved her narration.

Secondly, our protagonist in this tale, Jo, is a bully. There’s no way around it. She’s a bully as a teen in an all girls boarding school, and she’s a bully as an adult who seems to hate her child and her life. Jo is unlikeable in every way. And at first, I thought this was a failing of the book. Until the ending made me wonder if that was the point all along.

I struggled to get through the present day portions of the book, which felt meandering and bitter. The way older Jo talked about her body and sex was a bit odd and (in my opinion) unnecessarily descriptive for a non-romance novel.

Jo’s time as a divine was far more interesting, though no less off putting. It is told from modern-day-Jo’s perspective, and is tainted by her own bias and victim mentality.

Jo remembers herself as an innocent bystander to her life, but we all know innocent bystanders don’t exist.

In the end, The Divines morphed into a fascinating exploration of the stories we tell about ourselves, the mythologies of our past, the foggy mirror we use for self reflection, our warped self image built on fairytales based on memories.

How even the villain is the hero of their own story.

I recommend The Divines to anyone who has ever fudged their history to erase their guilt over a misstep or a misdeed. To anyone who lives life as a hero while the darker parts of themselves cling to the corners of their life in their blind spot, out of sight but not forgotten.

Trigger Warning: fatphobia, ageism, homophobia, bullying, severe injury

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ALC.


VIDEO REVIEW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEUKd...

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[MaryBeth's Bookshelf · Rating 4 out of 5]

WOW! I don't know what it was about this book, but I could not put it down. An exploration of the choices we make and how they haunt us through adulthood.

[KT · Rating 1 out of 5]

That was like taking a golf cart on a cross country road trip. And the final destination was a empty parking lot.

[Raychel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC audiobook version of this title!

I'm not going to say any outright spoilers but I might say some spoilerish things, so if you don't want to know anything about this book beyond the summary, please tread lightly with my review!

This is a tough one for me to review. It usually takes me a while to listen to audiobooks and at just over 11 hours, I flew through it in around 4 days. This is in part due to Imogen Church's absolutely phenomenal narration. I would give books a shot that did not interest me in the slightest based solely on how she handled this audiobook. 10/10 for her, she did beautifully.

There were parts of this book that I loved tremendously. I was enamored by Lauren and the differences she caused in Jo, the tiffs between the girls, the feud between the Townies and the Divines. The creation of the "Divine" girl was also so interesting. All of their habits and traditions were endlessly entertaining. The critique and discussion about the nastiness of girlhood and being a teenager was also done really refreshingly.

But in the end I am left feeling so...unfulfilled. And maybe that's the point and I just don't get it? Maybe I wanted something out of this book that it was never going to give me. I spent a good amount of this time being so angry at Jo and I thought there would be an eventual moral pay off. I would ultimately describe this book as a book about teenage girls viciousness from one of the bully's perspectives. Jo isn't the worst by any means. She has redeeming qualities and Eaton does a fabulous job of showing the pervasiveness of toxic behavior. Maybe if The Divines had another omniscient narrator that offered another perspective, I would find it more complete.

I'm also so upset by adult Jo's behavior. Every time adult Jo would have a section, I would spend the majority of it wishing that we could go back to her school days. I wanted to see growth and development and acceptance. I would have even taken recognition. But instead...she was exactly the same. Arguably she was worse. And again, maybe that's the whole point. In fact, I'm sure of it. But for me it wasn't enough.

Writing this review, I've talked myself up from 2 stars into 3 because I think there are some really strong aspects. I could see Ellie Eaton writing a book in the future that I would consider absolutely stellar based on those strengths, so I'm going to keep her on my radar. What I didn't like about this one just personally won out for me.

**EDIT: After thinking about this over the weekend, I'm dropping my review back down to 2 stars and what it really comes down to is Lauren. My little queer heart absolutely breaks for Lauren. I understand the reasoning behind having her character being used the way it was but really, I think it was fucking unnecessary. The more I think about her, the angrier I get. She was a joke and a punchline. It's far too often writers get away with writing characters like Lauren for a diversity quota and to ~explain~ some homophobia. It's 2020. We're better than this. Thinking about the bedroom scene after the haircut makes my blood boil. So, yeah. I had enough problems all around but Lauren really sinks this solidly down to 2 stars for me.

[kyle · Rating 2 out of 5]

afraid the pretty cover is all this book has going for it

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got sucked in by this campus novel and enjoyed some of its unique quirky elements - all girls school, narrator's mother also attended, all girls refer to each other with boys' names, and most intriguing - there is a significant town-gown tension. The chapters are largely at the school when Josephine is a child, but also show her as an adult starting from her honeymoon.

I enjoyed reading this, but ended it feeling some dissatisfaction in how some stories resolved.

Thanks to the publisher for giving me access through Edelweiss; this came out in January 2021.

[Jerrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing here was good, but the story was a bit cliche. The author introduced the idea that boarding schools impacted future relationships, but this wasn’t as well fleshed out in the modern day timeline as I would have liked, and ultimately the boarding school experience didn’t even seem to be the relevant issue in her relationship.

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus)]

DNF 20%

Now tell me if you have heard of this kind of story before: in the prologue, someone dies, years later our narrator for some reason looks back to the past and this 'death'. I kind of blame TSH for this 'trend'. Eaton's novel reads a lot like an amalgamation The Secret Place, The Lightness, Good Girls Lie, and All Girls. This kind of setup can be great if done right but I am afraid that in Eaton's hands it ends being a bland, and not nearly sapphic enough, affair.
I am so tired of the narrator with a "mousy" appearance and a boring personality. The writing too, in my opinion, of course, was pretty dire ("my nipples mutinous in the cold and hard as bullets. I enjoy looking at my wide, milky colored bottom"). Also, this book intend audience is an 'adult' one so why in the world does Eaton feel the need to remind her readers as if were three-year-olds, that when our narrator, who is clearly a grown woman in the 'now', is talking about her time as a pupil at this fancy school, this was in the pre-internet days ("This was preinternet remember; no one could google anyone"). Lastly, and this is something that quite a few English authors do when you have a character whose first language is not English, there is no need to throw in dozens of expressions (italicized of course) in their native tongue. Our narrator (whose name is Sephine....) is married to a guy who happens to be Austrian. While I know from my own personal experiences that sometimes some words might come to you in your mother tongue and you do not the English equivalent but here the guy is clearly fluent yet he says "Nein" and "Ja" and "Mein Gott". Come on, we get it, the guy is Austrian!
This novel offers very little to the clique/private school/someone dies subgenre. While I usually end up DNF reviews by saying that I'm sure others will enjoy this', here, I would advise readers to check out its overall score (tis' low for a reason) before committing to this.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received an ARC through the Book Club Girls Early Reads program from Harper Collins Publishers.

I’m sorry to say, but this book was absolutely awful. There was not one single likable character in the entire book. They were a bunch of insufferable, entitled, selfish brat bullies who used their perceived status to make life absolutely miserable for everyone around them. I read for enjoyment, but this book made me feel disgusted and angry at their awful behavior. If there was ANYTHING redeemable whatsoever in this book, I wouldn’t be so annoyed about wasting time finishing this book when I could’ve been reading something much better.

I will never recommend this book to anyone.

[Olivia (Stories For Coffee) · Rating 2 out of 5]

A sporadic dual timeline novel where, whenever the present is revisited, thrusts you out of the story just as intrigue was building. This plot brewed and bubbled to stir up tension and interest only to completely let you down on the last page.

A true waste of time.

[Cortney - Bookworm & Vine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a little hesitant to pick up The Divines based on the reviews, but I really enjoyed it! I thought the writing was really good, especially for a debut. This isn't going to be a book for everyone, but it was definitely for me. I wish I had more answers at the end, there were numerous story lines that didn't wrap up, but a solid 4 stars.

[Desiree · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's another boarding school baddie book coming at ya... and it's a flop. I had high hopes for this one, but it fell flat. It was one of those books where you finish and then think to yourself "what was the point?". However, I flew threw it - not because I enjoyed it, but because I was waiting for something to happen

Let me set the scene: we get an intriguing prologue involving a dead student dressed in figure skating gear. The book then reverses back in time and builds up to this big moment where we finally find out what happened.

The book is basically about high school bullies and how vicious teens can be to one another. The timeline alternates between the narrator Jo's past and her present - but she never seems to grow or develop in any way? There is some major fat shaming throughout the book as well as internalized homophobia and don't even get me started on how poor Lauren was treated throughout the book. She was basically a joke, a token gay person and I hated that she was used that way in this story. I get that it's set in the 90's, but I was disgusted by "gay" and "lesser" being used as an insult. It added zero to the plot. I think I could have gotten past it if these children had grown or developed as adults but honestly almost every character in this book was unlikable, both as teens and as adults.

Jo just gets worse as the book goes on. She's obsessed with these Polaroids of penises that she keeps in a lock box from her school days and she begins to withdraw from her family but it isn't really explained why. Nothing is explained in this book. Like why the girls all boy by boy's names...

I think the author was trying to make a point that perception isn't always reality, but this book missed the mark big time. Nothing is resolved. Nothing makes sense. I was left wondering what the point of the whole thing was.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This audiobook was off-putting and I honestly have no idea how to feel about this book. After doing some thinking and after reading a couple of reviews about this book, I feel like I have a better understanding as to what the author tried to do here and while for me, this was not a read I would describe as "enjoyable" it was entertaining and kept my attention from beginning to end!

In The Divines, you will follow Josephine's perspective in present and past time. She is very unlikable and I couldn't stand her most of the time. It made me think of how I should probably try to read less book with unlikable main characters. Once in a while is fine but I feel like I've read a few too many... but anyway! Jo is a bully but she sees herself as a victim, the hero of her own story. It was beyond frustrating to see her treat other people the way she did while still considering herself a good girl or whatever because it's what all Divines do. Sigh. I didn't expect this book to end the way it did but overall, this was an interesting, complex and off-putting read.

(Thank you for letting me read and review an ARC via Netgalley)

[Dannii Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

St. John the Divine is an English, all-girls boarding school brimming with pampered adolescents and a smattering of harried nuns who attempt to control them. These untamable creatures put on an united front to all those in authority, as well as to the wider world. Together they are the Divines and the Divines are an unstoppable force when they put their minds to achieving something. Or destructing it.

This was a far quieter story than the one I had anticipated, but I liked it no less for that. It begun with a horrifying scene and the novel then revealed all the events that led up to that calamitous moment. Interspersed were chapters from the protagonist's adult self, which I appreciated far less and took not as much from. Those chapters that were set on campus provided a continuous chain of intriguing and emotional revelation, however.

Jospehine, as our protagonist, was a very interesting character and I went through the full range of emotions, whilst reading her story: some parts had me with tears in my eyes and in others I actively disliked her. She held me at a distance, which I believe is a byproduct of her upbringing, teenage insecurities, and the woman she grew to be rather than the author's inability to craft an emotional bond between reader and protagonist. She was sometimes aloof and other times wholly vulnerable; sometimes I couldn't trust her story and other times I whole-heartedly empathised with her suffering. These shifting emotions and reactions all ensured I was engaged throughout, as her story was slowly unveiled.

The ending left me reeling, not due to some unforeseen twist or grand reveal but due to the side-characters reactions to Josephine's confrontations. She forced them to face up to the antics from their adolescent selves and it put a question mark over much of what had been previously revealed when they did not react in a fashion that Josephine or the reader was anticipating. I wasn't sure how to feel following this and when the novel ended it left me with a furrowed brow and much to ponder.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to the author, Ellie Eaton, and the publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, for this opportunity.

[Marta :} · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Divines could be cruel, conceited, arcane, but we were faithful to the end. We sobbed and hugged one another. Forever, we promised, always. Nothing could break us apart, proving in the end how much we underestimated Gerry. We swore on our lives. We crossed our hearts.”
Thanks to the publisher for offering me this copy of The Divines, you can also find my review on The Nerd Daily.

Ellie Eaton’s compelling debut is a study into how we constantly reshape our memories in order to make them fit better with the personal identities we are trying to build in the present. Any inaccuracies between who we used to be and who we are tend to be altered in order to create a more harmonious image of our self. And when trauma is also involved, can we really trust our memories to tell the real story? That’s what The Divines is trying to explore in addition to the Boarding School Syndrome, which is related to the long-term effects of attending a boarding school such as depression, anxiety, difficulties in forming and maintaining relationships, and even amnesia.
Josephine is newly married, she has a promising career as a freelance journalist, and her future looks so bright that she seemingly has no reason to dwell on the past. A spontaneous visit to her old boarding school will change everything and propel her on a journey of introspection and self-inspection. It will motivate her to reflect on the experiences that built her personality and made her who she is as an adult. She will think back almost obsessively on her classmates, the Divines with their pretentiousness, the way they isolated themselves, looked down on anyone from the outside, their odd traditions and lastly, the scandals that lead to the school closure. When she gets the opportunity to reunite with some of them, she will seize it and try to understand more about her past self and what really went down back then.
The students of St John The Divine are very privileged, they all come from rich families that pay ridiculous tuitions to the school and because of that, the teachers are extremely lenient on them. They let the girls get away with absolutely everything from taunting the school staff relentlessly to smoking and drinking on school grounds without ever being truly punished, they have no regard for the rules or for any authority. The antagonism between the Divines and the ‘townies’ (as the locals are called) made it even more apparent that the girls have no grasp of the real world or the struggles of everyone else because of their entitlement. They have nothing but disdain for anyone who is less than Divine and being Divine comes with speaking and acting in a certain way, owning fancy clothes and having boyish names. Because of this unity and even uniformity, the only characters that leave a lasting impression on Josephine are Gerry Lake who is the outcast of their class and Lauren, a townie that she befriends specifically because she comes from a different background and she isn’t easily impressed by the antics of the Divines. These two characters are the only ones that stir up trouble by not confining to the rules and standards set by the Divines, but there are definitely consequences for their actions.
What set this book apart from the others in the dark academia sub-genre is the emphasis on character development, the negative effects of such an elitist education, and the introspective process that an adult who went to a boarding school might go through, especially when faced with the important decision of choosing the right type of education for their own children rather than the usual themes of mystery, murder, and violence. It doesn’t completely shy away from these later subjects, but it definitely focuses more on human relationships and the psychology behind dark academia. The writing is lyrical and mesmerising, and the twists and the mysterious atmosphere will definitely keep you turning the pages in search for answers. There are some conflicts and plotlines that are build up and teased ceaselessly only to have some very unsatisfying and unforeseeable conclusions. Until you realise how unreliable the narrator really is, you might feel a bit tricked by those turns of events.
The Divines is a bold debut that shows us that memory can be way trickier than we think. It is a gritty study into how our identities are built, how our formative years impact us, and how our past will always influence us in ways that we might not even be aware of. The seemingly effortless way of building suspense, the beautiful writing, and the complex psychological themes that are addressed in this book will certainly convince you that Ellie Eaton is an author to watch.

[Tammy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Divines (as they’re called) are the girls at St. John the Divine, a private English boarding school. Josephine, who spent five years at the school, has received an invitation to the schools reunion of its students (it was closed in disgrace with her graduating class.) She’s now married with a daughter living in California. She hasn’t spoken to her classmates for fifteen years, and is unsure if she wants to attend. The invite evokes a strong need to reflect upon her time there. This story follows Josephine’s life during her years at the school, as a newlywed, and in the present. As her memories surface of the volatile, destructive teen relationships there, she draws closer to the secret that ended in scandal for the school. She begins having problems in her marriage, career, and is struggling to know who she is. This story probes into how past experiences affect who we are now.

[Celeste · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received an audio copy of this book from the publisher, Harper Audio, via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is not an esoteric academy novel, for sure. It’s a boarding school novel using the school mainly for setting and atmosphere. I was hoping for The Orchard or The Secret History, but at a girl’s boarding school. I got something more akin Pretty Little Liars or Cruel Intentions. I found it very superficial, with appearances mattering more than just about anything else. It’s also very crudely sexual. I was constantly taken aback by the vulgarity, and I don’t generally consider myself a prude.

The audio is great, though. Imogen Church has a fabulous voice. Her pacing and inflection are always spot on, as are her voices for different characters. The emotions she can pack into a single sentence is honestly astounding. Her performance was phenomenal, even if the story itself left me cold.

“Who are we, after all, if not the author of our own story?”

Josephine, our perspective character, is in no way likable. Neither are her school mates. Jo is also an apex unreliable narrator. Unreliable narrators tend to turn me off, though there have been some notable exceptions. Alas, this book was not one of those. I could never get behind her at all, or get invested in either of her stories in the two different timelines.

While I didn’t like the story, or the characters, or the vulgarity of the content, I can’t fault the writing. This book was incredibly well written. The quality of the prose combined with the audio narration were the only redeeming qualities for me. However, those qualities were redeeming enough that I would try something else Eaton puts out.

[Renae · Rating 2 out of 5]

DARK ACADEMIA FROM THE BULLY'S PERSPECTIVE

Ellie Eaton’s The Divines is well-written and engaging, but it suffers from something of an identity crisis. Is it an imitator of the “Dark Academia” classic, The Secret History? Is it a bleak exposé on the toxic world of ultra-elite British boarding schools? Is it a coming-of-age novel? Or, more confusingly, is it a story in which a school bully gets a redemption arc? The Divines is none of these books, and a great deal of the narrative’s bulk is wasted as the author tries to resolve on a definitive purpose.

I’m willing to grant that the author had a clear vision mind, but my concern is that whatever the point of all of this was, it wasn’t properly conveyed. The Divines flounders messily as it attempts to rise out of the soup of its own potential.

The book starts off promisingly enough. In the opening chapters, Eaton establishes her setting: the unspeakably toffish school of St. John the Divine in Oxfordshire—famous not so much for its academics as its capability of churning out trophy wives. We also meet 16-year-old Josephine (“Joe”), an awkward, skinny girl who desperately wants to fit in with her peers, and is obsessed with others’ perception of her. In spite of her wealth, status, and undeniable brains, Joe is lonely and a bit depressed. Her paranoia over ostracization is worsened when, at the start of a new term, she’s assigned a new roommate, Gerry, whose lower class origins and intense persona have rendered her the butt of Fifth Form’s merciless jokes.

Young Joe is a sympathetic character, as she is meant to be. The reader feels sorry for her as she tries to navigate the toxic environment of Divine, and the reader commiserates with the way her unpopular roommate affects Joe’s own social prospects. But there’s a catch. As with the more famous The Secret History, Eaton opens her novel with a grim scene in which Gerry’s apparently lifeless body is found by the Fifth Form girls, who—being over-privileged sociopaths—laugh it off and fail to alert the headmistress/police.

So, right away, we know there’s a dead body. The Divines sets its stage to be a complex unraveling of how Gerry came to be killed, presumably by her classmates. But instead of focusing on Gerry, the book spends a great deal of time exploring our narrator Joe’s growing pains: her crush on one of the school’s maintenance workers and her unlikely friendship with the same maintenance worker’s “townie” sister. Perhaps feeling abandoned by her friends, Joe latches onto this family and becomes a frequent guest at their modest council house. While this was all interesting and insightful into Joe’s character, none of these scenes have anything to do with the all-important question: What Happened to Gerry?

Eaton doesn’t seem pressed to answer this question, or even to tease her readers by dropping hints. Not only does The Divines spend a great deal of time following Joe around on unrelated adventures, the book has a split narrative. The book hops back and forth between adolescent Joe, and “adult Joe”—who now goes by the nickname Sephine and is married to a charming himbo from rural Austria. Grown-up Joe, the reader finds out, has completely lost touch with everyone from Divine, and her own memories of the fateful weeks preceding Gerry’s accident are hazy at best. At first, the inclusion of Older Joe seems to make sense. With the distance of 15 years and several thousand miles, perhaps this version of Eaton’s protagonist would be the best person to make sense of things and help answer the important Gerry-related question (see above).

Unfortunately, as the portions of the novel about Younger Joe progress, they become darker and more uncomfortable. (I think the conceit here is that somewhere in the future, Older Joe is reckoning now with the memories she lost, but this isn’t as fully developed as it might have been.) Regardless, it becomes more and more apparent that Younger Joe was a frightful, toxic bully. The carefully curated initial presentation of this character—a young girl struggling with self-confidence and self-image—still holds true, but now there’s a layer of aggression, violence, and cruelty on top. The longer the book goes on, the more difficult it is to view Joe as the “protagonist” in any sense of the word. The reader begins to suspect not only that Gerry’s death was no accident, but that Joe had a large part to play in…well, whatever happens. We still don’t know What Happened to Gerry.

Meanwhile, as teenage Joe becomes more and more despicable, Older Joe is…what, exactly? By the second half of the book, the inclusion of the “present day” chapters feels more awkward and pointless with each passing paragraph. If The Divines wants to be a book with an unreliable narrator who was a school bully, then commit to it, by god! But showing a seemingly depressed, anxious adult Joe, who struggles to make meaningful human connections and balance her family life, seems like a cheap trick to keep the character sympathetic. I began to feel that the story was headed in the direction of a Redemption Arc, of eventual amends being made in some way (but how? one wonders—Gerry’s dead, after all). Which might be okay, but the story never gives a real sense that Joe has actually changed since her teen years; rather, she’s conveniently blocked off all memories of her poor behavior so she doesn’t have to reckon with her actions.

Eventually, Eaton cannot keep hiding the truth behind the curtain. In two separate scenes, we find out what happens to Gerry. First (and as expected), Joe’s cruelty to the clearly unhappy girl comes to a head, and during a struggle in their room, Gerry is pushed out their third-floor window. Second, (and not expected), Gerry isn’t dead? Joe simply assumed that Gerry died after the fall, and then proceeded to go on and live the rest of her life without once looking into the matter, and, of course, she blocked off all her memories of that time period. Er…okay. That was a bit of a head-scratcher, but I’m fairly good at accepting poorly executed plot twists.

But now we arrive upon what I think the “actual” point of The Divines is: the fickleness of memory. At the outset, Joe clearly sees herself as something like a victim: an outcast, socially awkward, sexually inexperienced. Over time, Joe’s memories “return” to her, and while she never stops seeing herself as a victim, the narrative implicitly acknowledges that Joe was a bully, and that she and her classmates participated in frightful displays of vandalism, lawlessness, and violence. But then, Joe starts to reconnect with her former schoolmates, and we find out that their memories don’t match up with hers. To the other students at Divine, Joe was flawless, intimidating, beautiful. Everyone wanted to be Joe. She’s shocked to hear herself described thus—but even more shocked to learn that everyone has completely forgotten about Gerry and her fall. No one remembers.

Joe even goes so far as to reach out to Gerry, now a successful psychologist with a wife and two children. Joe apologizes, but Gerry waives it away—Gerry herself seems to have constructed a version of history that allows her to deny she was ever the victim of systematic abuse by her peers.

So at the end of it all, I have to wonder: why did I sit through this long recounting of Joe’s life? Am I meant to feel sorry for Joe? Am I meant to feel anything at all? Is The Divines an inverse murder mystery? Is it an extended commentary on the subjectivity of memory, using the British private school system as a plot vehicle? And what was the point of the entire sequence where Joe befriends the working-class “townie” family, loses her virginity to the much-older maintenance man/brother, and violently (homophobically) attacks the sister when she tries to kiss her? Make it all make sense!

As I said at the top of this review, I’m sure Ellie Eaton wanted to do something specific with this novel. However, The Divines is all over the place. If the narrative had been more focused, I think this could have been an excellent novel—particularly if the author had leaned into a more suspenseful Tartt-esque murdery plot. I’m not mad at The Divines, I’m just disappointed.

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[Mariana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Esperaba más de esta historia. Sin embargo es un libro que reflexiona sobre como construimos historias sobre nosotros mismos y cómo en realidad nos ven los demás. Incómodo de leer en ocasiones, me hizo pensar en cómo me chocan esas reuniones de ex alumnos porque puede llegar a ser difícil volver a encontrarte con esas personas con las que creciste. La historia sigue a Joe, quien reflexiona sobre su pasado en un prestigioso internado inglés. En esta escuela, el bullying era implacable y quien peor lo llevaba era una chica llamada Jerry.
Durante años, Joe se ha aferrado a esta culpa que influye en su vida, sus relaciones, su crecimiento personal. Al final del libro no le queda más que enfrentar a estas personas que ella había cortado de su vida para darse cuenta de que la forma en que la veían a ella y cómo sus compañeras vivieron las mismas situaciones son bastante distinta a cómo ella las recuerda.

[✨ jami ✨ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the writing style, it was really easy to fall into. super immersive. I also thought the ending was good and I liked that the author sort of had this hands off approach of letting it unfold without telling you how you should feel. but the plot just didn't have enough momentum or stakes for me. I was waiting and waiting for the author to pick up a plot thread and carry it along. I think I would definitely read another one of this authors books because there was potential here, but I just couldn't get into this specific story.