A girl thrust into an eerily impeccable finishing school must unravel the madness beneath its glimmering façade in Flawless Girls, an exquisitely crafted YA tale about the prescribed bounds of femininity by Anna-Marie McLemore (Lakelore; Mirror Season).
The Alarie House, a renowned finishing school, trains its girls always to exhibit unyielding grace. Seventeen-year-old Latina Isla Soler, unnerved by the students, left after one day. But her older sister, Renata--who once used mice to scare off visitors--finished her schooling and returned home "polished to a shine." This "doll version" of Renata frightens Isla with how completely she has "forgotten her own sharp, glittering heart," and with how something like rage, like violence, flickers behind her eyes. Isla, desperate to undo Renata's metamorphosis, re-enrolls at the Alarie House.
Isla learns little through the onslaught of daily comportment lessons, such as how to shield one's eyes from the sun or break the "awful habit" of biting into bread. Then the strangeness of night welcomes her. After dark, within the school's jewel-encrusted walls, inside its shimmering chandelier, atop the roof of a place gilded in the legend of its utter refinement is something wild. Girls dance carelessly, their postures broken from their daytime wine-stem rigidity. Girls scream, their teeth glinting like diamonds. Among them, always lucid and never ensnared by the reckless whimsy of the night, is Paz, "cynical and skeptical and far too amused about everything." Paz, who wears men's clothes and reminds Isla of a pirate king in a book illustration, notes that "whenever you polish something, you lose part of it," suggesting that the "edges" Isla possesses and loved about her sister are valuable. In Paz, Isla sees the same unhinged ferocity she'd glimpsed in Renata--one Isla senses rising within herself, ready to consume.
Isla wasn't "born with all the pieces her body was supposed to have" (McLemore suggests in their author's note that Isla might "embrace the terms intersex or differences of sex development") and she shirks the need to look like an "ideal young lady" while still identifying as female. Flawless Girls splits storied notions of proper femininity--and gender itself--apart at the seams in an exemplary portrait of learning to express oneself. The horror in the book lies in the house's absurd beauty, in the girls' untamed nights never discussed by day, in unreal fragments of experience that deflect Isla's questions. McLemore's signature prose both cuts like ice and rolls languidly off the tongue. Luxuriously chilling. --Samantha Zaboski, freelance editor and reviewer
Shelf Talker: A girl thrust into an eerily impeccable finishing school must sort the madness beneath its flawless façade in this exquisitely crafted YA tale about the prescribed boundaries of femininity.