A trend that has
been building over the last several years, particularly in young adult fiction
has been about secret societies in boarding schools. As you might expect these
elite schools often have agendas that are built on making changes within the school
or friendships but always service darker agendas. Late last year I read Kit
Frick’s Very Bad People which told the story of a secret club that was
supposed to be about revolutionaries bringing social justice – and like almost
all of them was about darker agendas and excluding the people who might want to
bring change.
This year I
became aware of an author named Jordyn Taylor and have within months read two
books that deal with heroines who become aware of insidious groups that have
existed for decades within boarding schools in upstate New York, each of which
are part of an insidious secret that has lingered for decades. Both books
resonated with me for different reasons because each dealt with different
monstrous aspects of our society – toxic masculinity in one, Cold War paranoia
in the other. And because both subjects are very pertinent to so much of what
goes on today, I’ve decided to violate one of my rules and cover both books in
one review.
The Revenge Game
opens
with an epigraph from Margaret Atwood that sums up much of what is to come:
“Men are afraid
women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”
The book then
opens with an article in late April telling how a prominent lacrosse student
named Brenton Riggs Jr. vanished after a prom at a boarding school near Lake
Placid called Sullivan-Stewart Prep. The boarding school is in the Adirondacks
and the student disappeared after a snowstorm that dumped more than two feet of
snow. Riggs is seen as popular and beloved by the student population.
We then
flashback to the start of the school year from the perspective of Alison
Benowitz who is in English Literature. She tells us that her school Stewart
Academy, an all-girls school has just merged with Sullivan Prep, an all-boys
school. It’s never clear why that happened to Alison but she’s looking forward
to it because she’s seventeen and wants to have ‘a great love story’.
Alison is
emotionally scarred from a crush she had last summer on an employee at a book
store which ended horribly. Since then she’s had a desire for a real
relationship and thinks this can only help her. Her roommate Jess is far more
cynical to this and there are signs from the start as to how underwhelming
intellectually and emotionally most of the boys at Stewart are. Alison is
willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, particularly when in an English
class she’s partnered with – Brenton Riggs.
Brenton Riggs
seems too good to be true at the start. He is admiring of Jordyn’s interest in
being a writer and writing romance novels, he’s willing to engage with her in
her favorite romantic gestures and he seems sweet and kind. But Jess and some
of her classmates are doubtful of his intentions. Within in a few weeks of the
merger they’ll have a good reason to doubt all of their new males classmates.
When the group
goes camping in November, Becca who hooked up with a classmate named Riley,
goes passed the guys tent had hears Riley bragging about his exploits with her.
Alison has been hearing stories like this but this becomes confirmation of
something of a competition known as ‘The King’s Cup.” As we will learn this is
a Stewart Academy competition of sexual prowess, where the participant scores
points based on how far they get with a girl. Very quickly it becomes clear to
most of Allison’s classmates that all of the boys they’ve been hooking up with
are very likely involved.
Alison has been
through this before with her own mother and herself and she becomes determined
to enact what she calls ‘vigilante justice mode’. She knows very quickly that
this has nothing to do with sex but rather power and she things that the best
response is humiliation. Within a matter of days, The Queen’s Cup is formed.
If you’ve read
my blog before you might remember my review of Lisa Lutz’s The Swallows which
covers much of the same ground – sexual competition in a New England boarding
school and the girls wreaking revenge on the boys. The Queen’s Cup is a
variation on this but a funnier and subtler one because this has nothing to do
with sex but rather humiliation. It also is more optimistic because in Lutz’s
novel the rot was so widespread and had been going on for so long that the idea
of ending it was impossible to fathom. With the merger barely in place, the
girls of Stewart are being preemptive in every sense: one of the goals of the
Queen’s Cup is to make sure the female student body becomes aware of the King’s
Cup so that they can protect themselves.
And the
humiliation, which took place behind closed doors in The Swallows, takes
place by necessity out in the open. Alison wants to make it very clear to the
participants in the King’s Cup just how horrible they are. And it all takes
place under the radar: in order to show they are part of ‘the resistance’, the
Queen’s Cup members draw crowns on their forearm.
How they
humiliate the most obvious offenders becomes part of the hysterical sections in
the book. The first victim is Riley Prentiss, who when he tried to ask out
Becca to the winter formal in a public promposal and Becca responds with the
girl acapella group singing Miley Cyrus’s FU in front of Riley in public. Much
of the action takes place in The Mikado’s way of making the punishment fit the
crime.
But Revenge
Game never forgets the darker elements, particularly when it becomes clear
that the Sullivan students are starting as early as ninth graders. And
it makes very clear that for most of the male teachers, they view this simply
as boys being boys.
Alison spends
much of the next several months balancing what is happening in the Queen’s Cup
to her relationship with Brenton Riggs, Jr. As the story continues there are
many clear signs that Riggs is aware of the King’s Cup and has clearly the
toxic qualities of his students. This is made most clear by the fact that his
father, who Alison meets at a faculty luncheon, is clearly a misogynist himself
who treats his own wife as if she was furniture. There’s also discussion of his
previous girlfriend Chrissy, who played for the girl’s lacrosse team and who
was Brenton’s girlfriend during the summer. Chrissy is clearly dealing with
issues, crying and upset much of the time and every time Alison meets her she
seems frail.
Then Alison
begins getting messages that seem threatening and implying not only her
involvement in the Queen’s Cup or perhaps her relationship with Brenton. They
are vague enough to be open to interpretation but they seem to be direct
threats. Alison spends much of the book following her relationship with
Brenton, which seems to have ups and downs but whom she clearly cares for. And
hanging over this is his disappearance, which keeps coming closer and closer
with each new chapter as prom nears.
This is
interspersed with news interviews and stories that keep giving ideas that
Brenton, Jr. may not be who he seemed to be and that the rot that goes on at
Stewart has been going back decades. Hanging over all of this is Alison’s
faculty advisor Mrs. Cole, known by many students as ‘The Sorceress’ because of
the cape like coat she wears and her dark foreboding behavior. She spends much
of the book trying to keep Alison away from Brenton and Alison, like so many
Stewart students, doesn’t listen to her because she has been a figure of
mockery for decades.
All of this
climaxes on the snowy night of prom where Alison and Jess learn that they have
not even begun to understand the true horrors of King’s Cup and that it has
infected every aspect of the school they live in. When we learn the truth of
Riggs’s fate (you might suspect what will happen but it is not what you are
thinking) it actually seems kinder than he deserves considering the horrors
that he, his family and the entire system that fostered them have reached on
women for decades with no thought or consideration.
And yet The
Revenge Game does something that The Swallows wasn’t willing to do
after a dark and violent climax, it ends in an optimistic denouement, not just
for Alison, who ends up realizing her love story with the last person she (and
the person) thought possible at the start but for the school itself. There is a
humorous and sweet tone that flows through The Revenge Game that helps
you get through the darker implications. Alison knows how ugly the world is
when the book is over, but she has the tools to get through it.
Don’t Breathe A
Word has
a similar setting to The Revenge Game. It centers on a teenage girl
named Eva Storm, who lived in New York City but has been sent to an upstate
boarding school called Hardwick. Unlike Alison, her decision was not voluntary:
her mother and stepfather sent her there and unlike Alison, whose mother
clearly loved her, Eva is the product of a teenage pregnancy. Her mother
married a man named Caleb, they had a child together and ever since then
they’ve made it very clear that their daughter Ella is the ‘good
daughter’ and Eva the failure. They have
secretly enrolled her in this school after years of emotional neglect because
they consider her a mess, never considering that she might be a mess because of
their neglect.
Eva has never
truly had friends other than Ella and has been lonely most of her life. So when
an Instagram celebrity named Jenny says that she thinks she’s the coolest thing
and says she wants to hang out with her for a party, Ella jumps at the chance.
She very soon learns that she is a potential inductee into the Secret Society
at Hardwick, known as the Fives.
For most of Don’t
Breathe A Word Eva’s story parallels that of another teenage girl named
Connie who attended Hardwick in 1962. This is the height of the Cold War and
the threat of Nuclear annihilation. Connie has spent most of her life dealing
with the fear that so many grew up with the atom bomb and the fact that her
story takes place during the height of the Cuban missile crisis underscores not
only her behavior but the mood of the entire school.
Connie is doing
her best to be a normal teenager. She has her best friend Betty whose been her
ride-or-die since they first came here and she has a secret crush on Craig
Allenby, the big man on campus but who happens to be attached to his longtime
girlfriend Helen. One day at a special assembly they are informed that a
fallout shelter is being built and the most popular teacher on campus Mr. Kraus
wants to plan an experience where six volunteers will try to live in this
shelter in the event of an actual nuclear attack.
It is only
because of the immense popularity of Kraus that many of the student body think
this is a good idea, and it’s only because Connie wants an opportunity to hang
out with Craig for three days that she signs up for it. She, Betty, Craig,
Helen and two other students end up volunteering.
The book spends
much of the story paralleling the journeys of Eva into the Fives and Connie in
the three days in the fallout shelter. It’s clear from the start that the
initiation tests involved are very complicated and dark, even by the context of
boarding school rituals in fiction. But it actually gets darker when Eva
becomes part of the Fives. It becomes that much of the secret society’s
attitude is based on surveillance, loyalty oaths and constant reports to each
other. We get a big hint as to why this is the case when we learn who the
headmaster and leader of the Fives is, but it is not my place to reveal that person’s
identity here.
As this
continues Eva finds more freedom when she tries out for cross country,
something she was good at before she got exhausted by it. When she’s trying out
for the team she meets a young man named Erik and he tells her that his
grandfather had a cousin who went to Hardwick was involved in the fallout
shelter - and died.
As the story
goes forward Erik and Eva bond, first over their search for the fallout
shelter, then on both being outcasts of a sort at Hardwick. One day they go to
the library to search for newspaper clipping and run into a group of other
teenagers whole-heartedly playing Dungeons and Dragons. While looking for
materials, they notice the newspaper filers aren’t as complete as they could
be. A moment comes but is interrupted
from a romantic moment when one of the players named Luisa asks them if they
want to play D & D. Naturally Erik recovers and says that’s exactly what he
was going to suggest.
By this point
Eva has begun to become extremely agitated being around the Fives whose sole
purpose seems to be as much about humiliation and power games then it is about
being a club that has fun. She jumps at the chance to play D & D and make
friends that don’t seem more interested in manipulation and humiliation. All of
these events lead to the confluence of all the two narratives – which as you
might suspect is in large part how the Fives was founded in the first place.
The story runs
parallel to The Revenge Game but there are far darker elements. It helps
that is a period piece and I’ve always liked those, particularly for young
adults who I think would benefit from learning these stories more than others.
It is not just the threat of nuclear annihilation that hangs over Connie and
her friends but all of them are more than old enough to remember McCarthyism,
something that comes to play more than once during the days in the bomb shelter.
The fact that the Fives have likely never heard of either the Red Scare or much
of the Cold War is not simply a case of generational ignorance; we learn at a
certain point in the novel that making sure that history is being rewritten.
Taylor never
hesitates to draw the parallels between the Cold War and today where an entire
generation has grown up with the idea of sacrificing your privacy in the name
of a vague threat to security. In both novels Taylor uses the idea of the
institution promoting success for the privileged rather than actual work having
to do with their success. Brenton and many of his fellow students are seen
raised in a world where the masculinity and wealth protects them from harm. Eva
sees a variation of this to – at one point a fellow Five thinks he can have sex
with her with no consequences – but it becomes very clear that the Fives bias
and prejudice covers all genders. At one point Luisa, the tech savvy genius of
the group, confides in Eva that she was Jenny’s lab partner on an assignment
and she did all the work. Jenny did nothing because her membership among the Five
ensures that she will never fail. Nor are they kind to their own; we see the
Fives more than willing to humiliate new and even veteran members for their
failings, no matter how small or insignificant they are.
We also get a
very clear idea in both books of the idea of how so many of these sins can have
ramifications through the generations. Late in the novel many of the Fives come
back for an alumni celebration including several of the people who were part of
the what happened in the fallout shelter. It’s here we actually meet a much
older Connie and she makes it very clear that she’s been carrying what happened
to her for more than six decades and that the guilt has affected every aspect
of her life. She has been living in a state of fear as if something horrible
will happen to hear and it has impeded her real happiness. We see this with
some of the other survivors – and we also learn that one of them died in
drunken accident years ago. The implication is very strong that the guilt turned
his once promising athletic career to ashes and he has done nothing but live in
a drunken stupor ever since. Only one person seems fine with the actions that
happened all those years ago and there are hints that there was a part of him
that was always capable of doing the kinds of things that happened there.
Both of Jordyn
Taylor’s books deal with themes that will resonate with too many people today:
toxic masculinity and misogyny in Revenge; bullying and spying in Breathe.
There are other commonalities in both books; struggles with ones sexuality
(Erik is bi and there are is at least one openly lesbian couple in Sullivan)
and the ability to find both love, family and bravery. At the end of both
novels, Alison and Eva find themselves doing things neither could have even
thought of doing at the beginning of the books but there’s a different context
in each. In both cases, the main characters find themselves happy and in love
with the person they care about the most, though its surprise to one in one
novel and something they had been working towards since the start of the other.
Both have learned what true bravery is and that it’s different from what they
thought at the beginning of the book. And both Taylor’s heroines have learned
that family is not so much the people who raised you but the people you come to
know and love along the way. That last one may seem like an obvious lesson to learn
but its one that many of us may have to spend our lifetime’s learning it. That
in both cases Taylor’s heroines found it out when they are still in high school
– well, there’s something that something that really should be on the curriculum of
every educational system in real life.
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