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Elise, Julie, Mae, and Molly are best friends, until Julie vanishes without a trace. Two years later, Julie returns in very bad shape and claiming no memory of where she's been. Once Julie is more recovered, her friends arrange a girls' week at a fancy hotel to catch up and reignite their friendship.
It's immediately clear that Julie came back wrong, and there are strong suggestions that there's something wrong with the hotel too. But Elise, the narrator, and Mae, who arranged the trip, are extremely set on denying that anything is wrong. A lot of the book consists of Molly trying to get Julie to talk and trying to get the other two to admit that something is wrong, and Elise and Mae refusing to listen. This is the central issue of the entire book, which is about denial and trying to insist one's preferred reality into existence, but it's frustrating to read.
The September House does something similar, but it was a lot more tolerable as at least Margaret isn't denying that there's ghosts, she's just denying that the ghosts are a problem. In The Return, when blood drips from the ceiling, Elise insists that it's just tinted water from a rusty pipe. In The September House, when blood drips down the walls, Margaret cheerfully cleans it up and crosses her fingers that no one else will notice the stain.
The slow-burn horror is well-done and the truth about Julie is pleasingly weird and even kind of original. The ending is quite moving, and the friend group dynamics are plausible for a particular type of people who I find annoying - extremely self-obsessed people whose friend groups border on frenemies. (They're canonically in their late 20s, but they act more like they're in their very early 20s.) But ultimately it feels like Rachel Harrison moves in really different social circles than I do, and that's deliberate on my part because those people are maddening. They're basically the women that women's magazines are written for - not the actually good magazines like Teen Vogue, stuff like the modern equivalent of 1980s Cosmopolitan that assumes you have a high-powered job but are also very concerned with Goop, thigh-toning, and office gossip.
It's immediately clear that Julie came back wrong, and there are strong suggestions that there's something wrong with the hotel too. But Elise, the narrator, and Mae, who arranged the trip, are extremely set on denying that anything is wrong. A lot of the book consists of Molly trying to get Julie to talk and trying to get the other two to admit that something is wrong, and Elise and Mae refusing to listen. This is the central issue of the entire book, which is about denial and trying to insist one's preferred reality into existence, but it's frustrating to read.
The September House does something similar, but it was a lot more tolerable as at least Margaret isn't denying that there's ghosts, she's just denying that the ghosts are a problem. In The Return, when blood drips from the ceiling, Elise insists that it's just tinted water from a rusty pipe. In The September House, when blood drips down the walls, Margaret cheerfully cleans it up and crosses her fingers that no one else will notice the stain.
The slow-burn horror is well-done and the truth about Julie is pleasingly weird and even kind of original. The ending is quite moving, and the friend group dynamics are plausible for a particular type of people who I find annoying - extremely self-obsessed people whose friend groups border on frenemies. (They're canonically in their late 20s, but they act more like they're in their very early 20s.) But ultimately it feels like Rachel Harrison moves in really different social circles than I do, and that's deliberate on my part because those people are maddening. They're basically the women that women's magazines are written for - not the actually good magazines like Teen Vogue, stuff like the modern equivalent of 1980s Cosmopolitan that assumes you have a high-powered job but are also very concerned with Goop, thigh-toning, and office gossip.