The Library at Hellebore
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3.5 • 11 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
A LibraryReads and Indie Next Pick!
A deeply dark academia novel from USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Khaw, perfect for fans of A Deadly Education and An Education in Malice who are hungry for something more diabolical.
The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is the premier academy for the dangerously powerful: the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers.
Hellebore promises redemption, acceptance, and a normal life after graduation. At least, that’s what Alessa Li is told after she’s kidnapped and forcibly enrolled.
But the Institute is more than just a haven for monsters. On graduation day, the faculty embark on a ravenous rampage, feasting on their students. Trapped in the school’s cavernous library, Alessa and her surviving classmates must do something they were never taught: work together.
If they don't, this school will eat them alive...
Also by Cassandra Khaw:
The Salt Grows Heavy
Nothing But Blackened Teeth
A Song for Quiet
Hammers on Bone
The Dead Take the A Train (co-written with Richard Kadrey)
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Khaw (The Salt Grows Heavy) delivers a shockingly gory and not entirely successful take on dark academia set at the Hellebore Technical Institute for the Ambitiously Gifted, a school for those with magical abilities. In an alternate universe in which magic has returned to the world after disappearing during the Renaissance, the government requires anyone presenting magical abilities to be rounded up and "educated" at places like Hellebore, which is no Hogwartsesque center of wholesome magical learning. Alternating between chapters labeled "Before," in which protagonist Alessa first arrives at the school, and those that take place in the present, when the teachers have revealed themselves to be bloodthirsty monsters intent upon feeding on the students, Alessa details the callous, bloody, and confounding nature of the school. Due to this alternating timeline, as well as the incomprehensibility intrinsic to the surreal workings of Hellebore itself, it can be hard to grasp the rules, norms, and limitations guiding this world, which makes the stakes uncertain. The characters, too, are difficult to parse: Alessa is a typical rebellious, sarcastic, young-adult heroine, but her relationships with her classmates—and theirs with each other—shift uncertainly from scene to scene. The result is messy, both literally and figuratively.
