The Belles is a wonderfully twisty and eerie story you won’t want to pass up on reading … especially during spooky season. The novel will leave you with a chill in your bones in the best way possible.

From Lacey N. Dunham’s website

In this richly atmospheric, dark academia debut novel, a young woman with a secretive past will risk everything—including her life—to fit in.

Belles never tell…

It’s 1951 at the secluded Bellerton College, and Deena Williams is an outsider doing her best to blend in with her wealthy and perfectly groomed peers. Infamous for its strict rules as much as its prestige, attending Bellerton could give Deena the comfortable life she’s always dreamed of.

She quickly forms an alliance with the five other freshmen on her floor, and soon they are singled out by the president’s wife as the most promising girls of their class, who anoints them: The Belles. They walk the college’s halls in menacing unison, matching velvet ribbons in their hair. But no sisterhood comes without secrets, and the Belles are no exception. Playing cruel pranks on their dormitory housemother and embarking on boundary-shattering night games, the Belles test the limits of the campus rules.

But as Deena begins to piece together the sinister history of Bellerton, her own past threatens to come to light, forcing her to make a dangerous choice. A chilling and seductive coming-of-age story, The Belles is an excavation of the dark side of girlhood, the intricacies of privilege, and the unbridled desire to belong at any cost.

Throughout my entire reading journey, I kept asking myself one question – what is going to happen to these girls, after the choices they make, the acts they commit, etc.? Every time I had a guess the actual reveal left me shocked. I had never read anything by Dunham prior to this but her strikingly atmospheric writing style has left me wanting more. Dunham’s vivid writing made me feel like I was actually at Bellerton (which added to the eeriness whilst reading). I felt like I had been in Deena’s room before, sat in the dining hall, and walked through the woods (yikes). Reading this book was a completely immersive experience.

Dunham also did an impeccable job at finding the middle ground between revealing just enough about a character’s backstory but also leaving readers to guess and come up with their own conclusions (adding to the mystery of it all).

At one point, I thought this story was going to be about sisterhood and the unbreakable bonds that can be made. And to some degree, it definitely was but it also left me thinking about the other side of sisterhood and how toxic it can be, the consequences of peer pressure, and broken systems that strive to hide the past.

Before I started reading, I was actually looking for a gothic and ghostly book to get me in the spirit of Halloween and spooky season and The Belles hit the nail on the head.

Disclaimer: Simon & Schuster Canada very kindly sent me an advanced digital copy of The Belles.

The book cover is from Lacey N. Dunham’s website.

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