3.75 rounded up.

I feel a bit frustrated with myself for not enjoying this more. I’d only ever seen five star reviews for it and actually put it off for a long time as I was so afraid of disappointment. And here we are. 😅

Firstly: I absolutely appreciate the depiction of a reform school here. Unfortunately this was a scourge worldwide, even the industrial schools and mother and baby homes here in Ireland had a similar, awful model.

Next: I do think the audio had something to do with my disappointment. While I loved the narrator’s musical southern accent, she also had an upward inflection at the end of almost every sentence that actually made the flow odd and hard to comprehend.

Let’s get down to it. Robert Stephens Jr is imprisoned at the age of 12 for kicking an older white boy in the shins after the older boy makes an inappropriate advance on his sister. In the reformatory, he encounters an awful, evil Warden Haddock, a population of broken down boys, and a lot of ghosts. Noting his ability to see the ghosts, Stephens is “employed” by the staff to catch them. Meanwhile, his sister Gloria works tirelessly to gain his freedom.

Things that worked:

— I loved the capricious Blue — I really loved the way that Due explored so many characters’ moral compasses and shortcomings. The NAACP are willing to help — to an extent. Miss Anne is willing to help — to an extent. Robert Stephens Sr fought for his ideals and the rights of his fellow workers, and ended up leaving his kids behind to face the consequences of his actions as a result. We get an idea of Boone, Haddock and Mrs Hamilton, who all have their reasons for working in the Reformatory, and I loved watching how they all squared the evil away to themselves. — I was rooting for Gloria at all times, and loved her perseverance in her brother’s name.

And the things I didn’t like:

— the pace. I listened at 1.2 speed and realistically I should have just sped it up. But there were whole swathes of this novel where it felt like nothing was happening. We tread the same ground over and over and a scene often felt like it was repeating itself. — the timeline. Despite the overall slow pace, the events of the novel take place in maybe a week? While this works on Gloria’s end, it made no sense for Robbie’s story. It made it hard to buy his friendship with Redbone in particular, but also he often spoke as if he’d been in the Reformatory for months. Gloria spoke of him the same way too, there’s a part where she says something along the lines of, “and now I hear he got a beating”. But the beating literally happens on his first day there. Similarly, his apparent skill on the trumpet made no sense with the time allotted. — it was relentlessly dark. YES, it’s Gothic fiction. But by the time I got to the end, so many miserable things had happened, and honestly I felt no faith in the children’s father to keep them safe (given he ran away to Chicago without them in the first place. I understand he had his reasons, but I still never felt like he was a true safe haven for them). Even the last chapter on the train was full of menace. — I never really felt that I wanted to root for the Stephens family more than I wanted to root for any of the other kids in there. I was disappointed to see that very little of the status quo changed overall and again, paired with my uncertainty about Robert Stephens Sr, it was hard to feel happy about the ending. They’d also left such a trail of destruction in their wake: Miss Lottie alone, her nephews in jail, Miss Anne’s savings gone, Lower Spruce almost burnt down, Redbone… it just made me feel: what was special about Robbie that all of that made sense? And of course, the answer in reality is nothing, but no 12 year old should be in a place like that. But narratively, I needed it to make more sense than it did.

Overall, I can appreciate this book’s qualities, but it was a dour, slow read and I won’t be reaching for another Southern Gothic for a while.