Full review: https://inkandplasma.com/2021/02/25/plain-bad-heroines/

Thanks to The Borough Press for the ARC of this book. It has not affected my honest review.

Trigger Warnings: death, animal attack, gaslighting, murder, attempted sexual assault, curses, unwanted pregnancy, manipulative behaviour, drowning.

I had high, high expectations for this book, which is usually a risk because I’m setting myself up for let down. Somehow this book side stepped every single thing I expected it to be, and still managed to be better than I had hoped. It’s a thick book with two timelines running parallel and while it could have been difficult to follow it was instead perfectly threaded so that I could always keep track. Not that I’m saying for a second that I understood what was going on – I spent most of my reading time spinning too rapidly from fear to confusion to fear again to be able to keep track of what I suspected was happening.

Plain Bad Heroines was my favourite kind of gothic horror. Not overtly jumpscary or gory, instead it created a pervasive kind of fear that left me unable to exactly pinpoint why my heart was racing. Though admittedly it didn’t help that I was plagued by very characteristic horrors while reading – a buzzing sound behind my head while I was in the bath and a truly nightmarish moment where I was reading and all the power cut, plunging me into pitch black darkness. Yes, I screamed like a baby. When it came to the gothic elements, this was pitch perfect. The yellow jackets were so, so unnerving as a repeated theme, showing up unexpectedly and always in a horrible, horrible way. The setting, an old school and a house with a spindly tower named Spite Tower, is mysterious and eerie even when things aren’t going awry and the whole thing was underwritten with the disconcerting feeling of, even as the reader, not knowing what was true and what wasn’t. The book fools you into thinking something might be a trick, then makes it seem entirely impossible, and it leaves you feeling uncertain and worried for the characters that you’ve come to love.

The characters in the past timeline felt doomed from the start, after all we know that Brookhants has a reputation for a reason, but that didn’t stop me wanting more for them. When the present day sections alluded to the tragedies that befall characters we know, my heart leapt into my throat. But it was the present day characters; Harper, Audrey and Merritt, that in my opinion are the stars of the book. Watching them develop from strangers into a new Plain Bad Heroines society made me equal parts excited and jealous. I’m not usually a huge fan of poly romances, mostly because I don’t read romance and I find they’re often less developed as side plots in a SFF or horror story but the romance arc in this book was perfection. I wasn’t expecting it, so when I found myself hoping for a poly romance I was ready to be disappointed. But I wasn’t. It wasn’t at all the main focus of the book but it was developed naturally and beautifully and left me with a very strong desire to go and read so much fanfiction about our modern day heroines.

The horror was there, uncertain and undescribed and absolutely under my skin, but equally I loved every part of this book with a strong sense of joy. I loved the characters, I loved the story. This book is full of sapphic women who have been pushed around and defined by heteronormative expectations carving out their own space in the world. Plain Bad Heroines was, in equal measures, empowering and frightening. I think the inherent queerness in this book and its characters made it addictive to me, watching queer women coming together and forming the kind of intense bonds that I know myself from gravitating towards other LGBT+ people even unintentionally. I can’t wait to reread this one the first chance I get, because I already know that there’s going to be more depth than I could possible have noticed the first time, too busy being scared of the yellow jackets.