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abbyzee

dark academia lover

288 points

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Level 3
Dark Academia
Universe Quest: Maasverse
My Taste
If We Were Villains
The Love Hypothesis
Hell Bent
Six of Crows
The Pairing
  • Hot Wax
    Sep 13, 2026
    Hot WaxM.L. Rio
    3.0
    Enjoyment: 3.0Quality: 4.0Characters: 3.0Plot: 4.0
    🎸
    ☠️
    📸

    This book was highly anticipated for me, as I absolutely devoured her debut novel If We Were Villains. I went into this novel with an open mind, as I was aware that Hot Wax would be different from her debut. However, after finishing the story, I do think it fell a little flat. However, M.L Rio’s storytelling is brilliant as ever, and I look forward to her future releases!

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  • Spoiled Milk
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    abbyzee reviewed...
    Aug 25, 2026
    Spoiled MilkAvery Curran
    4.5
    Enjoyment: 4.5Quality: 4.0Characters: 4.5Plot: 4.0
    🏫
    🩸
    👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩
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    abbyzee finished a book

    2w

    Spoiled Milk

    Spoiled Milk

    Avery Curran

    The untimely death of a student at a girls’ boarding school turns out to be the first in a haunting series of escalating supernatural events. A thrilling debut novel about teenage repression, queer desire, and the everyday horror of coming of age. In 1928, Emily Locke’s final year at the isolated Briarley School for Girls is derailed when Violet, the school’s brightest star (and a cunning beauty for whom Emily would do anything), falls to her death on her eighteenth birthday. Emily and her buttoned-up rival Evelyn are, for once, in agreement: Violet’s death was no accident. There’s an obvious culprit, the French schoolmistress with whom Violet was getting a little too close—they only need to prove it. Desperate for answers, Emily and her classmates turn to spiritualism, hoping for a glimpse of wisdom from the great beyond. To their shock, Violet’s spirit appears, choosing pious Evelyn as her unlikely medium. And Violet has a warning for them: the danger has just begun. Something deadly is infecting Briarley. It starts with rotten food and curdled milk, but quickly grows more threatening. As the body count rises and the students race to save themselves, Emily must confront the fatal forces poisoning the school. Emily’s fight for survival forces her to reevaluate everything she knows: about Violet, Evelyn, Briarley, and, ultimately, herself. Avery Curran channels the indelible ambience and intrigue of the classic boarding school novel while turning the beloved genre on its head in this visceral, exuberant debut.

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    abbyzee is interested in reading...

    4w

    My Dark Vanessa

    My Dark Vanessa

    Kate Elizabeth Russell

    Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer. 2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed? Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.

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    abbyzee TBR'd a book

    4w

    My Dark Vanessa

    My Dark Vanessa

    Kate Elizabeth Russell

    Exploring the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher, a brilliant, all-consuming read that marks the explosive debut of an extraordinary new writer. 2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa suddenly finds herself facing an impossible choice: remain silent, firm in the belief that her teenage self willingly engaged in this relationship, or redefine herself and the events of her past. But how can Vanessa reject her first love, the man who fundamentally transformed her and has been a persistent presence in her life? Is it possible that the man she loved as a teenager—and who professed to worship only her—may be far different from what she has always believed? Alternating between Vanessa’s present and her past, My Dark Vanessa juxtaposes memory and trauma with the breathless excitement of a teenage girl discovering the power her own body can wield. Thought-provoking and impossible to put down, this is a masterful portrayal of troubled adolescence and its repercussions that raises vital questions about agency, consent, complicity, and victimhood. Written with the haunting intimacy of The Girls and the creeping intensity of Room, My Dark Vanessa is an era-defining novel that brilliantly captures and reflects the shifting cultural mores transforming our relationships and society itself.

    0
    avatar

    abbyzee TBR'd a book

    4w

    Spoiled Milk

    Spoiled Milk

    Avery Curran

    The untimely death of a student at a girls’ boarding school turns out to be the first in a haunting series of escalating supernatural events. A thrilling debut novel about teenage repression, queer desire, and the everyday horror of coming of age. In 1928, Emily Locke’s final year at the isolated Briarley School for Girls is derailed when Violet, the school’s brightest star (and a cunning beauty for whom Emily would do anything), falls to her death on her eighteenth birthday. Emily and her buttoned-up rival Evelyn are, for once, in agreement: Violet’s death was no accident. There’s an obvious culprit, the French schoolmistress with whom Violet was getting a little too close—they only need to prove it. Desperate for answers, Emily and her classmates turn to spiritualism, hoping for a glimpse of wisdom from the great beyond. To their shock, Violet’s spirit appears, choosing pious Evelyn as her unlikely medium. And Violet has a warning for them: the danger has just begun. Something deadly is infecting Briarley. It starts with rotten food and curdled milk, but quickly grows more threatening. As the body count rises and the students race to save themselves, Emily must confront the fatal forces poisoning the school. Emily’s fight for survival forces her to reevaluate everything she knows: about Violet, Evelyn, Briarley, and, ultimately, herself. Avery Curran channels the indelible ambience and intrigue of the classic boarding school novel while turning the beloved genre on its head in this visceral, exuberant debut.

    0
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    abbyzee TBR'd a book

    4w

    Girl Dinner

    Girl Dinner

    Olivie Blake

    From the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, Girl Dinner is a darkly-fun novel about power, lust, and eating your fill, as wealthy moms and sorority girls practice a sinister new wellness trend . . . Good girls deserve a treat.Every member of The House, the most exclusive sorority on campus, and all its alumni, are beautiful, high-achieving, and universally respected. After a freshman year she would rather forget, sophomore Nina Kaur knows being one of the chosen few accepted into The House is the first step in her path to the brightest possible future. Once she's taken into their fold, the House will surely ease her fears of failure and protect her from those who see a young woman on her own as easy prey. Meanwhile, adjunct professor Dr. Sloane Hartley is struggling to return to work after accepting a demotion to support her partner's new position at the cutthroat University. After 18 months at home with her newborn daughter, Sloane's clothes don’t fit right, her girl-dad husband isn’t as present as he thinks he is, and even the few hours a day she's apart from her child fill her psyche with paralyzing ennui. When invited to be The House’s academic liaison, Sloane enviously drinks in the way the alumnae seem to have it all, achieving a level of collective perfection that Sloane so desperately craves. As Nina and Sloane each get drawn deeper into the arcane rituals of the sisterhood, they learn that living well comes with bloody costs. And when they are finally invited to the table, they will have to decide just how much they can stomach in the name of solidarity and power.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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    abbyzee commented...

    9w

  • Babel

    Babel

    R.F. Kuang

    Thoughts from 76% (page 414)
    12
    8
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    abbyzee is interested in reading...

    9w

    The Loom Tree

    The Loom Tree

    Angela Mi Young Hur

    Ninth House meets Babel for fans of myth and folklore in this contemporary fantasy about a Korean-American college student at a magical university where fairy tales intersect with family heritage to unleash powers beyond imagining. “You always wanted magic to be real.” Sharon and her daughter V’s points of origin hold common both Korean American teenagers, raised by a single mother, each searching for her identity in the California suburbs. But during finals week, high schooler V experiences strange impulses during a last-day celebration with her friends and ends up crawling into the hollow trunk of an immense tree. That night, after breaking into a raging fever, V sees gleaming strands of illegible text hovering over her a script that flows between her and her mother, leading to Sharon’s long-forgotten diary. With the aid of a luminous quill, a fountainhead of Sharon’s uncontrollable memories spill onto the old diary pages. Unexpectedly, V witnesses Sharon as she maps out her time at college in the form of lost histories, diagrams, and drawings. Young Sharon once accepted a backhanded invitation to Alvsdahl, an exclusive East Coast college as storied and white as Camelot. Here legacies and heiresses claimed descent from Bluebeard or Cinderella, grappling for control over narratives that could grant them terrifying abilities or burn them to ash. An Asian girl with an unknown inheritance was no one—until Sharon’s discoveries began to crack open Alvsdahl’s secrets. Her bewitching narrative of classroom rivalries and animal professors, debauchery in the woods and sleeping princesses, threatening Godmothers and world-shattering powers, unfold as V desperately tries to help her mother—only to see how Sharon’s story is destined to transform them both. Lyrically written and highly imaginative, Angela Mi Young Hur’s The Loom Tree is a magical campus novel centering on two young women walking the thorny path toward adulthood, the fractures between parents and their children, and the global mythologies and family sagas that connect us all together. 

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  • Sunburn
    Jul 02, 2026
    SunburnChloe Michelle Howarth
    4.0
    Enjoyment: 3.5Quality: 5.0Characters: 3.5Plot: 4.0
    💥
    💌
    🌅

    An unfiltered, raw, and poetic novel that feels as if it was ripped straight from the authors diary. The honesty of it all is heartbreaking and yet so captivating. Chloe Michelle Howarth’s prose is so unique; what an utterly beautiful book.

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