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  • The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant by Joanna Wiebe
  • Kate Quealy-Gainer
Wiebe, Joanna. The Unseemly Education of Anne Merchant. BenBella, 2014. [272p]. ISBN 978-1-939529-32-9 $16.95 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 8-10.

From the minute sixteen-year-old Anne Merchant arrives at Cania Christy, an elite boarding school off the coast of Maine, she realizes there is something not quite right about the eerie, fog-ridden place. The withered and decidedly creepy headmaster assigns her a Guardian, a sort of bodyguard/helicopter peer who will grade her every move according to her prosperitas thema, the guiding principle of her education assigned by the school. Anne’s directive is to “look closer” and when she does so, she finds a secret: Cania Christy’s students are actually dead, and their grief-stricken parents pay exorbitant “tuitions” (e.g., the supermodel wife of one father must gain 400 pounds, an oil mogul must agree to no fewer than seven oil spills a year) to allow their children the chance to earn a second chance at a mortal life. Readers clued into the various allusions to Faust and the more general hints that something paranormal is going on here will find the revelation of the school’s secrets not terribly surprising. Wiebe wisely makes Anne’s discovery not the climax of the story but part of her larger experience of realizing that no one here can be [End Page 289] trusted, but the logic gets a bit muddied when Anne realizes that she is not dead but merely in a coma and that only she has the power to put a stop to the Mephistophelean headmaster’s bargaining. The evil characters—and Mephistopheles is only one of many and arguably not the worst—make this a wickedly enjoyable entertainment, while the gloomy, spooky atmosphere provides enough spine tingles to satisfy readers looking for a decent scare.

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