My review:???
All Girls by Emily Layden is set in an all girls boarding school in Connecticut, and happens over a year, starting with the first day, where students are being dropped off, and drive past posters that declare a past student is making allegations of sexual misconduct against a teacher, who is rumoured to still be at the school.
This sets the tone for the year, with more information coming out about the past student, and then about the staff, with the school administration striving to keep ahead of the gossip.
The students are finding themselves, and so there are sexual experiences, consent, anxiety, secrets and a lot of emotions. Trigger warning, there is sexual assault in the book.
There are nine girls that we see the story from their perspective, and that’s a lot of different characters to try to keep straight in your head. I didn’t manage it for all of them, and I think that’s telling in itself. If I care about a book, I’ll be able to keep the characters straight, or I’ll go back and check what’s going on. In this book, I just kept going.
All Girls by Emily Layden was published on 18th February 2021, and is available from Amazon, Waterstones and Bookshop.org.
You can follow Emily Layden on Instagram and her website.
I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to John Murray Press.