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A Gripping Elite Boarding School Coming of Age Story – Violent Secret, Teenage Girls
by Ellie Eaton
Can we ever really escape our pasts?
The girls of St John the Divine, an elite English boarding school, were notorious for flipping their hair, harassing teachers, chasing boys, and chain-smoking cigarettes. They were fiercely loyal, sharp-tongued, and cuttingly humorous in the way that only teenage girls can be. For Josephine, now in her thirties, the years at St John were a lifetime ago. She hasn't spoken to another Divine in fifteen years, not since the day the school shuttered its doors in disgrace.
Yet now Josephine inexplicably finds herself returning to her old stomping grounds. The visit provokes blurry recollections of those doomed final weeks that rocked the community. Ruminating on the past, Josephine becomes obsessed with her teenage identity and the forgotten girls of her one-time orbit. With each memory that resurfaces, she circles closer to the violent secret at the heart of the school's scandal. But the more Josephine recalls, the further her life unravels, derailing not just her marriage and career, but her entire sense of self.
Suspenseful, provocative, and compulsively readable, The Divines explores the tension between the lives we lead as adults and the experiences that form us, probing us to consider how our memories as adults compel us to reexamine our pasts.
"At times both sharp and haunting, this novel embodies the awkwardness and regret of adolescence.... A layered and complex debut." —Booklist
"[An] intelligent debut… Eaton does a good job describing class tension and the misery of trying to fit into a social clique as a teenager. Josephine's steady unraveling of her teenage dramas will keep readers riveted." —Publishers Weekly
"A new mother tries to reconcile her former 'mean girl' past at a shuttered boarding school in this riveting and darkly comic addition to the campus novel canon. The Divines is as provocative and daring as teenagerhood, itself." —Courtney Maum, author of Touch and Costalegre
"The Divines is an absorbing, sharp exploration of the ways our adolescent secrets, relationships, and cruelties shape and haunt us into adulthood. Ellie Eaton's writing is thrilling and intoxicating, whether about the inexplicable power teenage girls have over one another or the challenges of defining a self outside of long-held traditions. A compulsively readable book; I couldn't put it down." —Alexandra Chang, author of Days of Distraction
This information about The Divines was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ellie Eaton is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, and Time Out. Former writer-in-residence at a men's prison in the United Kingdom, she holds an M.A. in creative writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, and was awarded a Kerouac Project residency. Born and raised in England, Ellie now lives in Los Angeles with her family. The Divines is her first novel.
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