Book Review - 'The Grimrose Girls' by Laura Pohl

There's hardly much for me to say about 'The Grimrose Girls', other than it adds weight to a theory of mine that in the last couple years a lot of publishing houses have been cutting back on editors and proofreaders, since again, this new book contains numerous and inexcusable typos. Or people involved in the industry are getting lazy. Either way, it goes to show how the late stage and endgame of capitalism is effecting everything - everything in our media, including literature. It is ruining--no, it is destroying everything, and we are all suffering for it.

Also, 'The Grimrose Girls' isn't a well executed and well written book overall, in my opinion. The diversity is great, that much should be lauded, but that alone can't save a weak story with squandered potential. The characterisation is inconsistent and confusing, any kind of plot structure is almost nonexistent, leading to a slow and meandering pace, characters whom it would be generous to call "minor" pop up and disappear just as quickly, plus you're somehow supposed to care about some of these names-on-one-page when they die much later on (no matter how brutally and grisly), other "characters" are superfluous and serve no real or solid purpose whatsoever, and the ending is underwhelming, with the mystery only half solved in order to set up the sequel, which is really not needed.

Stuff just happens. By and large forgettable stuff. Not a good sign for a mystery.

What a disappointing gothic mystery. But I can't say I'm surprised. YA has a bad track record when it comes to books like these.

The main Grimrose elite boarding schoolgirls themselves - Ella, Yuki, Rory and Nani - are interesting, distinct and diverse (in sexualities, body types and health issues as well as race), but they all become irritating and even infuriating to read about, around the book's second half; not helped by the aforementioned inconsistent characterisation. This is despite knowing they are teenagers with serious issues amidst a shadow of grief over the death - the murder - of a friend. Often they just do and act however the "plot" wants them to. Further on, especially when other gruesome student deaths start happening, and when overt supernatural phenomena occur, it becomes clear they don't act like believable human beings, let alone behave appropriately in any given situation.

Side characters suffer from the same problems. Nearly everyone gets their arsehole moment for the sake of conflict and angst, or to be gratuitously mean, or they're sketchy arseholes throughout for no logical reason.

I didn't like anyone more the further I kept reading. I only found them to be more difficult to like as I got closer to the end.

Also, are Frederick, Ella's love interest, and Edric, the murdered girl Ariane's ex-boyfriend, the only male students in Grimrose Académie? I now realise how similar their names are! And why is no one mentioning the boy who is murdered later in the book, alongside a girl? So it's not just girls who are targeted in tragic fairy tale fashion in the school, is it?

The attempts at humour are hit and miss; the Disney references mostly consist of misses, as does the banter between the four girls. I know three of them are grieving the loss of a best friend, and they are going through difficult times, but are they actually best friends themselves? They don't seem to like each other at all. Why are they friends? How were they friends even before the death which sets off the book's supernatural mystery "plot"? Hence part of the reason why I found them to be irritating to read about and follow.

The best compliment I can give 'The Grimrose Girls' is that it is a better version of 'The Sisters Grimm' by Menna van Praag. At least the four teenage girl leads who're based off of fairy tale female leads know each other and talk to each other, and there's no sickening heteronormativity everywhere. Almost no one is straight. The love interest of one of the girls is a trans girl*. What proud rep!

In conclusion: 'The Grimrose Girls' needed miles better editing and tightening before being published and sold in bookshops. More plot, less overarching situation; more clues earlier on, less revelatory clues that are contrivedly crammed in in the last fifty pages; and give the side characters more of a presence and something to do. Give them purpose other than emotional support, and make them good emotional support, who talk like actual human beings, at the very least! As for other characters who appear in and are mentioned in precisely one or two chapters, include them in further pages, or scrap them entirely.

Lastly: give a reason why certain overprotective parents wouldn't take their child out of Grimrose Académie after the news of the multiple horrific student deaths!

Final Score: 2/5

*Though said girl, Nani, is meant to represent Beauty of 'Beauty and the Beast', which makes the only trans character in the book, Svenja, intentionally or not, the Beast, which is problematic. In fact there is some problematic rep in the diversity (the absent Black father who abandons Nani, the cold, distant, somewhat heartless aro-ace Yuki, etc), so I can't say now that it's "great", no matter how much rep is included and spread throughout. How they are portrayed is just as important. At least Nani is a fat, bespectacled, half-Black/half-Hawaiin lesbian Beauty, and Svenja, who is connected to 'The Ugly Duckling' and 'Swan Lake', isn't angsty and is generally a cheeky, happy-go-lucky sort.

EDIT: How could I forget about another instance which proves the book's bad editing and bad writing all around - "Yuki snapped" (following her dialogue) is written eight times, maybe nine. She does snap at her friends an awful lot, doesn't she? Not that her unwarrantably mean and catty friends are any better.