Grimrose Girls by Laura Pohl Book Review

Rating: negative 2 out of 5 bastards

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Ah, the world of dark academia. Where waif-like youths with circles under their eyes deal with murder and conflict instead of going to class, and everyone smokes cigarettes artistically all the time or something. And there’s, like, a big Trinity College-style library that the characters have to meet up in to discuss their plots, plans, and how they didn’t get any sleep. You know, due to all the murders.

The Grimrose Girls by Laura Pohl is a fairy tale dark academia story where all the characters are modern versions of fairy tale princesses (Cinderella, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, etc) and go to an exclusive Swiss boarding school. On Libby, this book was described as ‘Perfect for fans of LGBTQ Rep,’ as if ‘representation’ is something you can be a fan of. I loved LGBTQ Rep’s latest album!

The book ostensibly circles around a group of friends mourning the loss of one of their own, who they think was murdered. Unfortunately, none of these girls are ever even remotely nice to each other and it’s difficult to believe that they are or were ever friends. The book seems to be more about passive-aggressively sniping at each other, or having meltdowns and yelling things like ‘You don’t understand! Our friend is dead! She’s dead and gone!’ at each other, over and over again.

The plot moves at a glacial pace, and the first 60% of the book or so consists of POV shifting between every main character (of which there are a lot), so each character in turn can sit around thinking about how her friend is dead, and she thinks she was murdered. Did I mention that their dead friend is dead and they think she was murdered? Because the book sure mentions it about 800 times without any progression.

“We all know what happened to Ariane!” Yuki barked. (woof!) “She died!”

[...]

Because Yuki was also right. Ariane was dead. They couldn’t bring her back, and they couldn’t act like she wasn’t gone. Leaving it at that, though, meant forgetting. It meant that Ariane had died. [...]

I don’t know, guys, do you think Ariane is dead?

Did it mean Ariane hadn’t just died? Somebody had killed her? Someone at Grimrose? What other secrets was the school hiding?

Hopefully a more interesting secret than this one.

After a while, the characters find a hidden book of fairy tales where all the tales have bad endings. Somehow, there’s a curse or something, and everyone who represents a fairy tale is doomed to die according to the bad ending. It’s unclear how the curse works, and the characters don’t figure it out because they spend another 20% of the book sitting around saying things like, ‘We couldn’t possibly have any connections to these stories! I’m only a girl named Ella with an evil stepmother who makes me do all the cooking and cleaning. Did I mention I have two stepsisters, and I love sewing and making dresses?’

Truly, the characters in this book are so stupid and unaware that it’s physically painful to read. They’re incapable of putting the smallest clues together, and due to their idiocy, the plot judders along with all the speed of a rowboat in the desert. When a character does manage to bang two braincells together and make a spark, she’s promptly nuked by the other characters not believing her and arguing with her for another 20 pages. ‘What do you mean, we’re all fairy tales? Fairy tales aren’t real! I’m just a normal daughter of royalty named Aurora!’

Eventually, some more fairy tale esque murders happen to side characters that we’ve never met before and have no attachment to. Every subsequent murder becomes more and more insane, Final Destination style, adding an unintentional layer of comedy to the story. At one point, two characters are running around in a secret passage and discover the body of a girl whose head is busted open because she fell down the stairs, and she’s holding… a bowl of porridge. OH GOD JUST LIKE GOLDILOCKS. THE HORROR! PORRIDGE MURDER! THOSE BEARS WON’T GET AWAY WITH IT THIS TIME! It’s never explained why she was walking around a secret passageway holding a bowl of porridge. (She needed privacy for her breakfast?)

At some point while doing a whole lot of nothing the characters decide that this other girl, Penelope, has caused all the murders somehow (magic?) and they track her down to the lake, where they kill her after she tries to kill one of them. This makes very little sense because we’ve already established that the murders are caused by a curse, so it’s unclear how Penelope did any of it. Once they kill Penelope, they explain that they’re still cursed.

“So what do we do?” Rory said. “We still have to break the curse.”

Rory, I’ve been waiting for you all to break this curse for the WHOLE DAMN BOOK. Don’t tell me the book ends here, without a shred of payoff!

Readers, it does end there. After spending about half the book sitting around saying ‘hmm, looks like we’re cursed,’ the characters fail to: uncover any information, do any investigating, make any progress, or do anything about it. And then the book ends. At least there’s a sequel!

Okay, that’s enough of the plot. Let’s touch on a couple other topics.

The Characters

The students belonged to a very different world. There were the uniforms, of course, but also the shoes, bags, jewelry- everything spoke of a privilege and wealth that Nani had never seen before, meant only for the best of the best. The elite of the elite. That’s who Grimrose was meant for, that’s who the magic was built for, not some poor half-Black, half-Native Hawaiian girl like Nani.

Yep, that’s a natural way to include representation. I often state my identity in my internal monologue for the benefit of the reader. But hey, at least if you do it that way, you don’t have to include any of that icky tricky stuff, like subtlety, or nuance, or good writing.

All the characters are some kind of capital ‘R’ Representation, which is usually explained to us like the above, where the narration grinds to a halt so the character can tell us they’re demisexual. It was incredible, because despite the identities being passed around like Halloween candy, every character still managed to read exactly the same. The closest metaphor I can think of is like when you’re a kid at McDonalds and you put every flavor of soda in your cup and then you end up with a kind of medium sludge that tastes somewhat like every soda but mostly like no soda at all.

The Grammar

Okay, here it is. This is a long section with a lot of excerpts, but I can’t adequately convey how many grammatical errors there were in this book without showing you. Besides the examples here, the sentence structure was often purely incomprehensible. I found myself having to reread sentences because the subject didn’t agree with the verb, or the sentence wandered into another tense, or it was a run on sentence with about five independent clauses fighting for dominance. I am including this section because it makes me very very sad that books are getting published with this many errors. Seriously, it's making me so sad I’m crying right now.

Okay, here goes.

It was the eyes she saw first, sunk deep into her face. They had the same skin tone of pale olive, and the hair, rather than a rich brown, was mousy.

The eyes had a skin tone of pale olive?

Out of all the notorious students in the castle, Rory Derosiers was probably the one most used to living in one.

She lives in a student?

“Thanks for walking with me,” Nani said and then shut the door on Svenja’s face.

Ouch!

The inside revealed a book the size of a diary.

The inside revealed a book the size of a small book.

He always called her that, like he’d called her mother before, because it was one of the few words in Hawaiian he knew because of the stupid Elvis song, and even then, he didn’t use it correctly.

This sentence just keeps going. Every time you think it’s done, there’s another comma.

Ella remembered it, because it was tragic. “The Little Mermaid” was told she had to kill the prince to get her legs permanently, if not, every step was like walking on broken glass, pins and needles puncturing her skin. She couldn’t do it, so she turned back into sea foam.

A confusing and awkwardly worded explanation of The Little Mermaid. There should be a period after ‘permanently,’ but whatever. Who cares about grammar when you could be making big cash publishing terrible YA as quickly as possible!!

Ella was walking by herself when Nani found her.

“Svenja said she’ll get me into the archives,” she said as a way of greeting, walking faster to catch up to Ella in the hall. “That way we can match the remaining names on the list.”

[Jigsaw voice] Hello there reader, I have a simple game for you. Figure out which character in this chapter opening is the point of view character… Nani, or Ella? Guess right, and you walk away with your life. Guess wrong, and, well… Let’s just say you might not live happily ever after.

It had been easy for Ella to find her. The town whispered words like witch, but towns were never particularly kind about old and lonely women. She was, however, a psychic, a word that meant witch, but in a politer sort of way.

“That’s not what it means,” Ella muttered.

Ella, you’re the one narrating. Why are you contradicting your own internal monologue. Does psychic mean witch or not?

“All the girls on the list are dead,” Nani announced, throwing her notebook on the table toward Yuki and Rory. “We’ve just came back from the archives.”

Did anyone proofread this? You can tell me.

It was like seeing magic at work, one click, and it opened up, revealing its secrets.

Again with the commas.

Rory had come home from it drunk last year, carrying a laughing Ariane in her arms like a bride, and they both collapsed into a pile of hearty laughter as soon as they came in through the door.

This book has a lot of difficulty with tenses, so here’s a hint: the beginning of the sentence should be in the same tense as the end of the sentence. Now just go ahead and apply that trick to every sentence, and you’ll be well on your way to coherency.

Yuki wet her lips. “What you guys are saying, you realize what that is. Magic isn’t real.”

What you guys are saying, you realize what that is. Thrilling dialogue here.

“Of course I can,” Rory said. “They’re never here. Do you think my mother still remembers the color of my eyes or only because of the ridiculous portrait in the living room?”

This sentence makes me feel like my own brain is glitching out halfway through.

When it wasn’t the note, it was Annmarie’s head, her dead eyes staring ahead, her body lying completely severed, and the blood didn’t even spill because of the shock.

Beheadings are bloodless now! Because of, uh, shock. Don’t worry about it.

She ran faster, even though her ankle was still in pain, but Frederick was a lot taller than her, and had more practice exercising, which Ella herself had none, not for lack of everyone reminding her of it.

This sentence limps forward with every new comma, not unlike Ella limping with her twisted ankle. Or me, limping through this book.

Penelope was wearing the ring. Ella could see it now. She’d said she’d gotten it for her fifteenth birthday. But Ella had remembered that the real Penelope had gotten it for her thirteenth. She was wearing it on the picture.

I’m guessing she was wearing it in the picture, but whatever. Who needs copyediting? Just publish that shit!!

When Ella was done, there was nothing left.

She did what she did, because that was all she could do.

She did what she did, because she did do what she did. She do did diddly do did what she did. Because that was all she could do.

Penelope turned her vivid green eyes to look at Yuki. They looked vast, like green fields of emerald, and in them, the inherent coldness that came with that.

I’m not going to torture you with all of the descriptions of Penelope’s green orbs, but I’ll make you read the best worst one: penelope’s emerald fields.

The review is over.

Except it isn’t.

One of the author’s favorite tricks in this book was to state something in the narration, and then start a new paragraph contradicting herself, starting with the word ‘except.’ Like so:

I read this book and thought it was a really good book.

Except I didn’t. It wasn’t a good book. It was a bad book.

It got to the point where I was rolling my eyes every time I saw ‘except.’ Here, I’ve compiled a nice reference for almost all of the times this particular device was used.

Studying at Grimrose was a guarantee of your future. When you studied at Grimrose nothing could ever go wrong.

Except that on the eve of the first day of school, one of the Academie’s most exceptional students had drowned in the school lake.

“I’m just preparing you for what’s to come,” she said. “I don’t want to make this worse for you. I know how hard it must be.”

Except Reyna didn’t know.

After retiring from the Marines, he’d traveled all over the world and found a job as a security guard for the school. He promised Nani the pay was good, and that he’d see her soon.

Except he hadn’t come back for her.

It was Rory’s favorite time of the year, that last stretch of warmth, right before the cold took over.

Except that right now, it felt like something was missing.

All of it was as it was supposed to be.

Except it wasn’t.

It meant that Ariane had died and the had world swallowed her up, and that one day they’d wake up as if nothing had happened.

Except it had.

(Note the extra error in this excerpt!)

Nothing was supposed to change.

Except she was changed [...]

A chill climbed over Nani’s spine. An ugly duckling? No. Impossible.

Except impossible wasn’t a word in their vocabulary anymore.

Nani didn’t need to feel guilty talking to her.

Except of course there was a reason she was doing this.

Nani laughed. The moment of easy banter felt surreal, something she had read in books, something that she always imagined friendship would be like. Easy conversation, jokes, laughter, where two people could share everything.

Except Nani couldn’t share everything.

Thunder crashed above and lightning struck. The flames licked the book, and Yuki put her hands on it, feeling the heat, waiting for the book to start to burn.

Except it didn’t.

Nani got up, went to the bathroom, turned the tap on the sink to let the water pour. Then she stuck the book right underneath it, letting it get soaked.

Except it didn’t.

“No you don’t,” Yuki replied, getting up, but Penelope was faster, pulling her hand away, holding her in place, the same way she’d done on the first day.

Except this time, she didn’t let go.

Well, all I can say after all that is I’m happy I read this book so I could bring you this review.

Except I’m not happy. I’ll never be happy. I’ll never be happily ever after… Ever.