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A review by camscornerbooks
A Dangerous Education by Megan Chance
3.0
3.5 âï¸
Three creepy 17 year old girls at a reform school and a socialist/communist-friendly unmarried female teacher in the height of the red scare looking for the daughter she gave up when she was their age. Intriguing premise but I didn’t love the execution.
This is supposed to be someone who is on her toes when it comes to, we’ll, everything. This mid-thirties unmarried woman with socialist ties in her past watches her every move knowing the disaster that could happen in the new witch hunting days of McCarthyism. And yet… she’s dumb. She’s intelligent, but gosh she makes so.many.stupid.decisions. I really hate when a character makes out of character decisions simply to push ahead the plot. That’s what this felt like to me. This woman knowing the dangers all around making some of the dumbest moves she could make. This to me was really distracting and frustrating to read each time it happened. I don’t expect characters to never make mistakes but the mistakes have to fit the character.
Overall the pacing at the beginning was a bit off in my opinion though. We got a LOT of Rosemary’s backstory before we really got any of the present day story and to me it felt like too much. It was told in flash backs but the volume of it and details we got made the beginning of the book feel heavy and the pacing dragged. I think the same background info could have been given better over time and with less unnecessary detail.
It wasn’t all bad but I like to explain why I rated a book lower than perfect for anyone looking for information that might influence them to read it or not read it and I find the negatives more informative, at least for me, in that regard.
The author had a good grasp on the atmosphere of the reform school, she wrote the girls and their creepiness really well. The overall plot and mystery was strung along at a good pace and each person in the story felt believable. Overall I enjoyed the story, the mystery of which girl it was and how would this trio of sirens would wreak destruction on everyone around them in the end.
I liked the pressure of the red scare and the atomic panic that provided the background of the book. It added palpable fear and consequences to everything that happened and provided a malevolence without a villain. That pervading fear and threat lent a lot to the atmosphere without a ridiculous foil for the protagonist.
Overall I did enjoy this, the drawbacks didn’t take it down too much for me. This is a dark academia adjacent story I’d recommend to those looking for one.
Three creepy 17 year old girls at a reform school and a socialist/communist-friendly unmarried female teacher in the height of the red scare looking for the daughter she gave up when she was their age. Intriguing premise but I didn’t love the execution.
This is supposed to be someone who is on her toes when it comes to, we’ll, everything. This mid-thirties unmarried woman with socialist ties in her past watches her every move knowing the disaster that could happen in the new witch hunting days of McCarthyism. And yet… she’s dumb. She’s intelligent, but gosh she makes so.many.stupid.decisions. I really hate when a character makes out of character decisions simply to push ahead the plot. That’s what this felt like to me. This woman knowing the dangers all around making some of the dumbest moves she could make. This to me was really distracting and frustrating to read each time it happened. I don’t expect characters to never make mistakes but the mistakes have to fit the character.
Overall the pacing at the beginning was a bit off in my opinion though. We got a LOT of Rosemary’s backstory before we really got any of the present day story and to me it felt like too much. It was told in flash backs but the volume of it and details we got made the beginning of the book feel heavy and the pacing dragged. I think the same background info could have been given better over time and with less unnecessary detail.
It wasn’t all bad but I like to explain why I rated a book lower than perfect for anyone looking for information that might influence them to read it or not read it and I find the negatives more informative, at least for me, in that regard.
The author had a good grasp on the atmosphere of the reform school, she wrote the girls and their creepiness really well. The overall plot and mystery was strung along at a good pace and each person in the story felt believable. Overall I enjoyed the story, the mystery of which girl it was and how would this trio of sirens would wreak destruction on everyone around them in the end.
I liked the pressure of the red scare and the atomic panic that provided the background of the book. It added palpable fear and consequences to everything that happened and provided a malevolence without a villain. That pervading fear and threat lent a lot to the atmosphere without a ridiculous foil for the protagonist.
Overall I did enjoy this, the drawbacks didn’t take it down too much for me. This is a dark academia adjacent story I’d recommend to those looking for one.