Blythewood by Carol Goodman (review)

An encounter with a sinister man in a cape on her sixteenth birthday brings misfortune to Avaline Hall’s life: her mother falls into a deep depression and eventually commits suicide, Ava is then forced to find work at the Triangle Waist factory, where she loses her only friend to the massive fire, and her ravings about being saved from the fire by a handsome, winged boy land her in the insane asylum. Ava’s estranged grandmother eventually springs her from the asylum and then promptly sends Ava off to Blythewood, an elite and secretive boarding school for girls and her mother’s alma mater. There Ava learns that she is part of a long tradition of women who fight to keep evil—faeries, Darklings, winged boys—out of the mortal realm. All is going swimmingly for Ava until she spots the man in the cape again and begins to question—much like her mother did before her—the ideas that hold Blythewood together. An author of adult literary thrillers, Goodman is known for her elegant prose, but unfortunately here much of that style is stripped away, leaving only an unfocused plot and an overabundance of characters. Indeed, most of the girls Ava meets, be it at the factory or the school, act merely as transmitters of important information rather than full characters. More effective is the mystery behind Ava’s mother’s death and the involvement of the man in the cape, who casts a chilling shadow whenever he appears and reignites reader interest. This may therefore still find an audience among fans of the historical fantasies of Libba Bray and Saundra Mitchell, but be sure to also point older readers looking for a spooky boarding-school story towards Goodman’s section in the adult collection.