150 pages
Published 2021
Read from November 10 to November 11
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
I remember not enjoying the portrayal of Cora when she was introduced in Beneath the Sugar Sky. As a fat person with aspirations of athleticism myself (before Long COVID made that feel impossible), I thought Cora—a fat girl bullied for her weight, who only ever thought about her weight or her history of bullying—seemed tokenized, reduced to a didactic device rather than allowed to be a character in her own right.
Either McGuire has become more skilled at integrating the social message into her stories, or Cora, as the primary viewpoint character in Drowned Girls, finally has room to become something more. Strained and sleepless from the lingering effects of encountering the Drowned Gods in Come Tumbling Down, Cora begs to be transferred from the Home for Wayward Children to the Whitethorn Institute, a rival school for children who’ve gone through Doors.
Whitethorn is pretty much the worst place for a teen with Magical World PTSD to go. It’s a straightforward allegory for conversion therapy: a gray and rigid school of enforced conformity, where students are drilled to forget what’s real, adhere to one single way of being a person, and become the children their parents wanted.
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