Review: Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

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Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

Published: 24th March 2021 | Publisher: The Borough Press | Source: Bought
Emily M. Danforth’s Website

1902, Brookhants School for Girls: students Flo and Clara are madly in love with each other, as well as completely obsessed with The Story of Mary MacLane, the scandalous debut memoir by 19 year old MacLane. A few months later they are found dead in the woods, after a horrific wasp attack, the book lying next to their intertwined bodies. Within five years the school is closed. But not before three more people die on the property, each in a troubling way.

Over a hundred years later, Brookhants opens its doors once more, when a crew of young actresses arrive to film a high-profile movie about the rumoured Brookhants curse. And as past and present become grimly entangled, it’s soon impossible to tell quite where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins... From The StoryGraph.

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The StoryGraph | Goodreads

Trigger/Content Warnings: This book features vomit, a fire, use of both soft and hard drugs, alcoholism, mention of suicide, a mental asylum, abuse of a patient, and attempted rape.

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Interview with Emily M. Danforth

I am absolutely thrilled to be interviewing YA author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Emily M. Danforth, today! Fantastic answers!

How did you come up with the idea for The Miseducation of Cameron Post?

There were actually many ideas that propelled and shaped this novel during the years that I was writing it. I don’t think I can pin the whole book down to one idea or a-ha moment. I didn’t say to myself one day, or even one week, “Well this is the big idea, this is the story I have to tell.” This novel is really a collection of disparate ideas working, I hope, in chorus. It was my first novel, and so there was just so much I wanted to “get at” with it. I knew, early on, that I wanted to write a great big coming-of-age story that spanned several years of a character’s adolescent life, and I also knew, early on, that this main character would be gay—that part of the novel would be about her burgeoning queer sexuality. In addition, I knew that I’d set at least part of the story in eastern Montana, where I grew up, because that landscape just has a way of seeping into you, and I wanted to do that landscape, that place, justice, in a novel. I also figured out, pretty quickly, that the book would be a voice-driven first person novel, which told me a lot about how to write it, how to approach the material. But other aspects of the novel came much later, after lots of starts and stops and dead-ends. I was several months into working on it before I realized that Cam would be sent to conversion (or reparative) therapy. I made that choice after I learned about Zach Stark, a sixteen-year-old from Tennessee whose parents sent him to a conversion therapy summer camp (this caught the attention of the national media after Zach Stark posted about this on his then-myspace page). It was that story that got me to spend months researching conversion therapy, and all of that research shaped so much of what ended up in the novel.

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Review: The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth

The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth - When Cameron Post's parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief. Relief they'll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl. But that relief doesn't last, and Cam is soon forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her well-intentioned but hopelessly old-fashioned grandmother. She knows that from this point on, her life will forever be different. Survival in Miles City, Montana, means blending in and leaving well enough alone (as her grandmother might say), and Cam becomes an expert at both. Then Coley Tasylor moves to town. Beautiful, pickup-driving Coley is a perfect cowgirl with the perfect boyfriend to match. She and Cam forge an unexpected and intense friendship one that seems to leave room for something more to emerge. But just as that starts to seem like a real possibility, ultrareligious Aunt Ruth takes drastic action to fix her niece, bringing Cam face-to-face with the cost of denying her true self even if she's not exactly sure who that is. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a stunning and unforgettable literary debut about discovering who you are and finding the courage to live life according to your own rules. From Amazon UK

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