At an elite boarding school steeped in the history of witchcraft and untimely deaths, a sharp, grieving senior crosses paths with a brilliant, provocative new student researching the campus’s darkest legends. Obsession and academia entwine in A Lesson in Vengeance, a gothic spell of ambition, grief, and the stories we tell ourselves.
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Start or resume Shelf TalkThese picks are popular with readers who enjoyed this book. Possible spoilers below.
In A Lesson in Vengeance, did you enjoy the slippery, memory-haunted first-person narration?
If what pulled you into A Lesson in Vengeance was living inside Felicity Morrow’s fogged memories—never quite sure what happened to Alex or what Ellis is coaxing into the light—you’ll love Oliver Marks’s confession in If We Were Villains. As Oliver recounts the unraveling of his Shakespeare troupe at the Dellecher Conservatory after a classmate’s death, every recollection feels as precarious as Felicity’s nights in Old Crow House. The truth hides in performance, friendship, and guilt, and the tension of what Oliver won’t say echoes the way Felicity sidesteps the darker corners of Dalloway and the Dalloway Five.
In A Lesson in Vengeance, did you enjoy morally gray, intoxicating friendships that curdle into violence?
If you were captivated by Felicity and Ellis’s dangerous, magnetic push‑pull—two brilliant girls circling obsession and transgression—The Secret History offers that same seductive slide. Richard Papen falls in with a tight classics cohort whose brilliance masks rot, much like how Ellis flatters and provokes Felicity into reenacting Dalloway’s darkest lore. When the group’s intellectual games spill into bloodshed, the chilling rationalizations mirror the way ambition and mythmaking at Dalloway distort right and wrong.
In A Lesson in Vengeance, did you enjoy occult lore woven into elite-campus power games?
If the whispered witchcraft at Dalloway—the rituals in Old Crow House, the legend of the Dalloway Five, the question of whether Felicity’s workings are real—hooked you, Ninth House puts that ambiguity on blast. Alex Stern patrols Yale’s secret societies, where rituals can literally carve open reality, and her uneasy mentorship under Darlington echoes Felicity’s fraught entanglement with Ellis. Like Dalloway’s archives and Ellis’s research, Lethe’s case files reveal how scholarship, privilege, and the occult blur into something perilous.
In A Lesson in Vengeance, did you enjoy a brilliant, grief-tilted mind unraveling under artistic and social pressure?
If Felicity’s spiraling interiority—grief for Alex, susceptibility to Ellis’s manipulations, and that gnawing need to belong at Dalloway—kept you breathless, Bunny sinks you into another dangerously suggestible psyche. Samantha, isolated in her MFA program, gets drawn into a clique whose workshops devolve into uncanny "creations," much like how Ellis pushes Felicity toward reenactments that flirt with violence. Reality warps under the pressure of art, ambition, and loneliness, echoing the way Dalloway’s history seeps into Felicity’s mind.
In A Lesson in Vengeance, did you enjoy a claustrophobic, insular school that swallows you whole?
If the boxed‑in intensity of Dalloway—the creaking halls of Old Crow House, the closed circle of girls, the suffocating traditions around the Dalloway Five—was your favorite part, Catherine House gives you that same sealed terrarium feeling. Ines submits to a school that isolates students for years, its secret research shaping them as inexorably as Dalloway shapes Felicity. The atmosphere is thick with secrecy, rumor, and ritual, and the campus itself becomes a character—just like the haunted rooms where Felicity and Ellis test the boundaries of myth and reality.
