Sarah's Reviews > Bad Graces

Oooh, this was a tantalising good YA horror. It’s tense, mysterious, and it held me deeply in its grasp until its last page.

After years of struggling through foster homes Liv Whitlock wants out. Unfortunately, her history isn’t the most shining example of who she is, so when an opportunity comes along to win an internship, to be on set for a movie adaptation of ‘The Tempest’, she jumps on it, sending in her written application, but using all of her sisters personal details. The application wins, and she suddenly finds herself on a yacht, heading towards Alaska, with the director, the hottest young actresses of the moment, a famous pop star, a young Olympian, and a social media influencer. However, things take a very sharp turn when their boat hits a storm, and next thing they know, they’re waking up sputtering on a beach. As they start the fight for survival, they also begin to discover that every injury they sustain on the island is healing in an inexplicably odd way…

What I loved about this book is that there’s
the ‘typical’ horrors of what it would be like to be ship-wrecked, washed up on a small North Pacific island with minimal provisions and no way of calling to help, and then there’s that creeping, mysterious, unease as each injury heals in a different way, as they realise there’s some kind of otherworldly creature on the island, and they try to decipher what any of it means.

There’s quite a lot of body horror imagery in here, enough that it gave me the odd shivers up my spine, which I always find impressive in a YA horror.

The characters are all so well fleshed out. Their fears, wants, emotions, all heightened as a result of this situation they’ve found themselves in. This is a group of teenage girls, with very different back stories, who’ve all sustained some level of trauma in their past, thrown into pure survival mode, and having to adapt to that. It’s not always pretty, but they’re all always doing their best dealing with the circumstances they’ve been handed, while forming bonds along the way.

The key story here is about surviving trauma, what that means, and what that might look like, against a backdrop of ominous creeping horror, and it’s extremely well done.

Thank you to the publishers, and Netgalley, for the copy to review.