2023 read #14: A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee.

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

373 pages

Published 2021

Read from February 1 to February 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

I don't think I can review this book without some substantial spoilers, so consider yourself warned. I'll do my best.

I expected this to be a book about dark magic, hauntings, and metaphysical mysteries. Most of what I read these days is fantasy, so of course that was my automatic assumption. The book's atmosphere is immaculate: set in a creaky old house at a girls' finishing school in the Catskills, famously founded by the daughter of a witch who escaped Salem and marked early by tragedies and legends of witchcraft. (I did my best not to let the book's hazy indifference toward the actual geography of the Catskills ruin my immersion in this atmosphere. Suffice it to say that the Hudson River and Esopus Creek are not the same thing.) Instead, it's a cleverly metafictional dark academia thriller, most closely aligned with The Girl on the Train out of anything else I've read in recent years.

Like The Girl on the Train, A Lesson in Vengeance is a story of gaslighting and manipulation. Vengeance has the added clever twist that our narrator, Felicity, is planning to write her senior thesis on the very same themes as the book itself. As Felicity sums it up: "Mostly how depictions of mental illness are used to build suspense by introducing uncertainty and a sense of mistrust, especially with regard to the narrator's perception of events, and the conflation of magic and madness in female characters." That thematic recursion was my favorite aspect of Vengeance.

As a whodunnit, Vengeance might have been a bit too easy to crack. Major spoilers here: The way Ellis was constantly manipulating and controlling Felicity made it too obvious that Ellis couldn't be trusted, and Felicity's own layers of false memories regarding the night her girlfriend Alex died also made it obvious that some degree of "darkness" existed in her characterization. But overall I found the ending satisfying. At least it avoided the trap Girl on the Train fell into, with its generic thriller standoff climax. The way Ellis and Felicity's stories wrapped up pulled everything into a tidy little circle.