All Girls wastes a juicy setup
Boarding school drama trades good storytelling for drama
All Girls Emily Layden St. Martins
The publisher has labelled Emily Layden's debut Prep meets My Dark Vanessa, and for readers who love a juicy boarding school drama, that's enough. The boarding school aspect of All Girls is vividly rendered. Layden conveys the geography and architecture of the fictional Atwater campus, its routines and rituals, its stratified social hierarchy. The trouble comes in the “juicy” department.
Despite the elements of sex, secrets and scandal, All Girls is surprisingly dry. The author's impulse seems more sociological than novelistic; more than a story to tell, she has a point to make.
The narrative revolves around a rape that happened 20 years before the novel opens in 2015.
Freshman Lauren Triplett is on her way to Atwater with her mom when they notice a series of signs — an image of an iconic campus tower beside the words “A RAPIST WORKS HERE.” This is the first of a yearlong series of acts meant to draw attention to not just the crime in the past, but ongoing issues in the present. So there's a double mystery: one, who is the rapist; two, who is the vigilante.
Prep and My Dark Vanessa immerse the reader in the intense interior life of their main characters, but Layden's decision to move to a different character's perspective in every chapter frustrates reader commitment. Lauren is seen only in a couple of flashes after the first chapter.
Chapter 2 focuses on Macy, a runner with an eating disorder; Chapter 3, Louisa, the editor of the Daily Heron, planning coverage of the coverup; by the time we get to Chloe, in Chapter 4, being forced to wear a unicorn onesie for a traditional freshman initiation ritual (and to endure the book's single miserable sex scene), it's getting difficult to remember who's who. And that's before the all-inclusive parade of characters that follows: the scholarship girl, the legacy, the lesbian, the ex-ballet dancer, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, the granddaughter of Indian immigrants, the gold cross-wearer ...
In between each pair of chapters, there's a document — an email from the head of school, an article from the local paper, the report of a consultant hired to assess Atwater's response to sexual misconduct allegations, a message from the board, etc.
Several of the most important plot points are revealed in these bureaucratic artifacts, which has a cooling effect of its own, though the mystery remains unsolved, and intriguing, until the end.
It seems unlikely that anyone will miss the point of All Girls, but just in case, graduating senior Mia Tavoletti states it outright in the final pages. “We've been living inside the section of the Venn diagram where a culture that protects men ... overlaps with one obsessed with prestige and status and reputation,” she tells a freshman friend.