The Grimrose girls by Laura Pohl

Boarding school-based Sapphic fantasy murder mystery… seems like a lot of genres to fit into one book and a tall ask for an author to pull it off, but Pohl does this, rewriting a selection of fairy-tales with a magical twist, for her third novel. This gives us a story of four friends in their final year of school at an exclusive Swiss boarding school/castle, who, in searching for the truth behind their friend’s apparent suicide, uncover a book of curses that has been predicting the gruesome death of students for years.

Each of the girls is modelled, loosely, on a fairy-tale character from the original Grimm brothers’ tales. The chapters alternate between the different points of view of main characters Ella, Yuki, Rory and Nani, giving a layered description of events as they try to stop the killer before they become the next victims.

The isolated castle and spooky surrounding forest set the fantasy scene well with secret passages, hundreds of staircases and cavernous library. The girls and their class-mates embrace a wide range of diversity of disability, race and sexuality, and Pohl cleverly reveals these aspects throughout the book as we get to know the characters better and observe their reactions and interactions. Mental health issues are also raised, friendships are tested and behaviours are questioned as the girls break through self-doubt and others’ expectations, helping each other to become stronger, more resilient and better friends.

A fun element was piecing together the mystery of who the girls’ fairy-tale characters were, but to thoroughly engage with the book, readers would need to understand how fantasy ‘works’, or at least be willing to completely suspend disbelief.

The book itself contains a content warning of suicide mention, depiction of anxiety and OCD, parental physical/emotional abuse, parental death and light gore.

The sequel The Wicked Remain is due in November 2022, and as a result, many of the plot threads are left unresolved, which would be annoying for those readers not invested enough in the characters to want to add it to their reading list.

Themes: Friendship, LGBTQI+, Fantasy, Fairy-tales.

Margaret Crohn