Flawless Girls
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected May 28, 2024
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- $11.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
Tautly written, tense, and evocative, this is a stunning YA novel by award-winning and critically acclaimed author Anna-Marie McLemore.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Determined to turn them into polite society girls, the grandmother of Latina sisters Isla, 17, and Renata, 20, enrolls them at Alarie House, a prestigious finishing school. While Renata is impressed by her poised and pastel-dressed housemates, Isla senses "something off" and leaves. After Renata returns home unrecognizable, threatens Isla, and runs away, Isla endeavors to win her sister back by becoming an Alarie girl. Though Isla makes friends with queer rule-breaker Paz and Carina she struggles to perform through feelings of self-doubt relating to past bullying and constant comparison to Renata, which highlights the differences Isla (who is intersex, according to an author's note) sees between her own body and those of the other girls. As she creeps closer to the secret violent nature of the house, Isla receives terrifying visions ("Her mouth was a geode, broken open and filled with crystals"). McLemore (The Mirror Season) expertly layers dreamlike descriptions ("like a drop of gilded rain") to craft the otherworldly, gothic atmosphere in which this sensitive portrait of an intersex person unfolds. Mixing horror and fantasy, the deftly woven plot simmers to a satisfactory if perfunctory conclusion. Supporting characters are intersectionally diverse. Ages 13–up.
