Thursday, December 29, 2022

Reader, I Murdered Him

Reader, I Murdered Him
By Betsy Cornwell
Clarion Books, 2022. 291 pages. Young Adult Fiction

Adele grew up in the shadows--first watching from backstage at her mother's Parisian dance halls, then wandering around the gloomy, haunted rooms of her father's manor. When she's finally sent away to boarding school in London, she's happy to enter the brightly lit world of society girls and their wealthy suitors. Yet there are shadows there, too. Many of the men that try to charm Adele's new friends do so with dark intentions. With a queer romance at its heart, this lush historical thriller offers readers an irresistible mix of vengeance and empowerment. 

This reimagining of Adele Varens provides an enlightening and thrilling background to the vain and precocious child in Jane Eyre. The novel, told from Adele's point of view, elaborates on her dark childhood, lonely adolescence, and eventual coming out into society. I enjoyed the themes of found family, female vengeance, and first loves. 

If you like Reader, I Murdered Him you may also like:

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While investigating the mysterious death of matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of a famous soap empire, Andy Mills is seduced by the safety and freedom found in Lavender House, where a queer family lives honestly and openly, until he becomes a pawn in their deadly game.
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Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, 2022. 389 pages. Young Adult Fiction

In 1655 sixteen-year-old Tania, daughter of a retired musketeer, finds out after her father's murder that he has arranged for her to attend Madame de Treville's newly formed Académie des Mariées in Paris. It turns out that the Académie is less a school for would-be wives, and more a fencing academy for girls, so Tania begins her training to be a new kind of musketeer, and to get revenge for her father.

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