A review by vacantbones
A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

4.0

"I remember painting the blood on Ellis's brow, Ellis gazing at me as if she could see through my mask and into the heart of me.
My fingers were still on her skin, wet and scarlet, as she murmured my name.
Whatever else the others felt, I knew what I saw in Ellis's eyes last night.
Euphoria."

I'll be the first to admit it: My idea of what A Lesson in Vengeance would be was horribly different from what it was. Based on the mini reviews I'd seen while mindlessly scrolling through Reddit, I had assumed that this book was something of a supernatural love story, witches kissing under the moonlight with familiars dancing around them.

Yes, dear reader. This is what I thought it would be. And I was so wonderfully wrong.

As I stared at the stack of library books checked out mere weeks before coming down with a case of The Virus That Shall Not Be Named, I picked up A Lesson in Vengeance for a light YA read. We meet Felicity, returning to her posh boarding school after spending a year away in the wake of her girlfriend's untimely death. Those "closest" to Felicity worry about her mental state in connection with an obsession with witchcraft that she'd developed in the months leading up to her girlfriend's death, a fire that is fueled by the dreadful legacy of Dalloway School. She soon meets Ellis, a new student whose literary interest in the witchy ways of Dalloway is magnetic to Felicity.

This is a very, very dark book. This darkness includes mental illness, estranged family relationships, alcoholism, death (particularly that of the murder variety), and my favorite: the twisted animal that is the friendship between teenage girls.

I won't spoil the book for you, but I found myself enamored with how Victoria Lee is able to write so accurately about the dark, dangerous ties that can develop between two teenage girls. I remember being 15 and finding myself inexplicably drawn to a girl who unintentionally served to bring out the absolute most dark parts of my being. Lee absolutely nails that feeling, and does an excellent job weaving in romantic relations as well.

I loved the way A Lesson in Vengeance was written, and my biggest fault with it was just how unbelievably pretentious the characters are. I get it, they're rich, privileged, and highly educated, but I had trouble at points believing any 17 year-old knows some of the vocabulary Felicity utilizes as our narrator. This was the double-edged sword of the book - the writing is smooth and sophisticated, making it compulsively readable, but it feels far more like that of university students.

I also was concerned by how oblivious Felicity is to the abundance of red flags flying in front of her, though I know it's supposed to be chalked up to her questionable mental stability and age (again, there's a reason parents use the "if you friends walked off a cliff..." metaphor with teenagers).

Ultimately, I unexpectedly enjoyed this read more than anticipated. It's sinister and mean and poetic, and I think my brain will be reminding me of this one for a while.