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FLAWLESS GIRLS

Anna-Marie McLemore

The Soler sisters are infamous in polite society - brazen, rebellious, and raised by their fashionable grandmother who couldn't care less about which fork goes where. But their grandmother also knows the standards that two Latina young ladies will be held to, so she secures them two coveted places at the Alarie House, a prominent finishing school that turns out first ladies, princesses, and socialites.
Younger sister Isla is back home within a day. She refuses to become one of the eerily sweet Alarie girls in their prim white dresses. Older sister Renata stays. When she returns months later, she's unfailingly pleasant, unnervingly polite, and, Isla discovers, possibly murderous. And the same night she returns home, she vanishes. As their grandmother uses every connection she has to find Renata, Isla re-enrolls, intent on finding out what happened to her sister. But the Alarie House is as exacting as it is opulent. It won't give up its secrets easily, and neither will a mysterious, conniving girl who's either controlling the house, or carrying out its deadly orders. Tautly written, tense, and evocative, this is a stunning YA novel by award-winning and critically acclaimed author Anna-Marie McLemore. Anna-Marie McLemore was born in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and taught by their family to hear la llorona in the Santa Ana winds. They are the author of The Weight of Feathers, a 2016 William C. Morris YA Debut Award Finalist; 2017 Stonewall Honor Book When the Moon Was Ours, which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature; Wild Beauty, a Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Booklist best book of 2017; Blanca & Roja, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice; Dark and Deepest Red, a Winter 2020 Indie Next List title; and The Mirror Season, which was longlisted for the National Book Award in Young People's Literature.
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Published 2024-05-28 by Feiwel & Friends

Comments

[A]n exquisitely crafted YA tale about the prescribed bounds of femininity by Anna-Marie McLemore... McLemore's signature prose both cuts like ice and rolls languidly off the tongue. Luxuriously chilling

As eerie and twisted as a delirium dream, this dark academia from award-winning author McLemore explores the pressures put on women to be perfect and what happens when those pressures become too much.

McLemore expertly layers dreamlike descriptions ("like a drop of gilded rain") to craft the otherworldly, gothic atmosphere in which this sensitive portrait of an intersex person unfolds. Mixing horror and fantasy, the deftly woven plot simmer...

This novel, which has a strongly gothic mood, gets off to a strong start... The book also has excellent representation of an intersex character, an element that further interrogates "what it means to be a girl, much less the right kind of girl." A chaotic fever dream that will evoke strong responses from readers