If it’s written by Anna-Marie McLemore you know I have to read it. They are an auto-buy author and so I had to read Flawless Girls. And it’s a story about sisters and rage. About the boxes they try to stuff us into. Keep reading this book review of Flawless Girls for my full thoughts.
Summary
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.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Flawless Girls is a mysterious, suspenseful, almost bordering on thriller story about a finishing school. It’s about the confines of womanhood, of the cages girls are trained to inhabit. All the ways society will enforce our obedience, our empty gazes, and complacency. The myriad of ways we have to learn how to be a girl. In many ways, I loved Flawless Girls for its themes. For the ways McLemore examines and explores this specific image of girlhood, being unmoved, un-opinionated, and ‘flawless’.
(Disclaimer: Some of the links below are affiliate links. For more information you can look at the Policy page. If you’re uncomfortable with that, know you can look up the book on any of the sites below to avoid the link)
If you love Anna-Marie McLemore books, you have to pick this up. There’s the characteristic explorations of society and expectations with a splash of feminine rage. Flawless Girls is about beauty and betrayal, decadence and decay. About a society who wants mere reflections of themselves. The characters, and the examinations of sisterhood, serve as powerful motivators. We see Isla’s sister relationship and all the things we do for our siblings, the ways we forget ourselves. Find Flawless Girls on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.