User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
NOW AVAILABLE!!
this book is campy and silly while dealing with some very serious subject matter and all those earnest hand-wringing folks will likely ask if this is what we “need” right now as a society, but today—seduced by the unexpected option—i bought lavender-scented roach spray, and now i will forever associate bug-extermination with vaporized grannies, so there are a lot of things we do not
need as a society, but which make unpleasant things just a little bit weirder. and that’s what this book does: it takes predatory teenage boys, sexually exploited teenage girls, and the blind eyes and cover-ups of responsible adults and makes it weirder than an SVU rerun, rompier than a lifetime original movie, less of a soul-crushing depression bomb than a news story. this one is, dare i say?—fun, and i needed some fun right now, even if that fun is sculpted around a rotten core of humiliation and blackmail and revenge.
if it sounds like this book trivializes rape culture and the objectification of women, i’ve explained it poorly. it doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the problem to offer a book with a lighter tone about that problem. you can buy your acrid-chemical-scented bug spray and feel confident that it is addressing your issue. or you can address the issue and also have some humorous images in your head as you do so.
like spraycan grannies.
and this book’s helpful blowchart:
it’s a breathlessly quick read, and the pacing ushers the reader over some of the book’s undeniable potholes: yes, there are too many characters and only a few are narratively significant; yes, the villains are very villain-y and there’s not a lot of nuance; yes, it’s convenient that all of a sudden, this longstanding and verrrrrry secret society of rich lazy white boys is outed en masse, simultaneously, in a creative writing class survey; yes, a prank escalation seems like a disproportionately mild response to the situation, but be aware that escalation can really…escalate. what starts with a stolen scooter sometimes ends…more dramatically.
it's a fun and funny book, and while it may not be as #metoo #messageheavy as other recently published books on the subject, that doesn't mean it is without lessons about life and love.
“You don’t make a spork for a guy you’re not into.”something to keep in mind...
come to my blog!
Rating: really liked it
A new teacher at a third-rate boarding school assigns to her creative writing students the task of answering what appear to be innocent questions. The answers reveal much more than she anticipated not only about the students themselves but about hidden activities occurring at the school. Cleverly done, with a powerful message this novel is amusing as well as uncomfortable. What bothered me most was that a friend’s son spoke of a similar situation at his high school so despite the humor contained within the book there is some degree of truth present.
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?” Maybe. In this instance it’s more like hell hath no fury like teen-aged girls who have been exploited, objectified and humiliated. Believe me, these girls aren’t fooling around.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars, rounded up
I was a huge fan of Lutz’s The Passenger and the entire Spellman series. While the Spellman books were all just great fun, The Passenger showed she had the chops to do an intriguing, serious mystery.
With The Swallows, we get something different again. Alex Witt arrives at a New England boarding school thinking she’s going to teach English Lit, but gets handed creative writing instead. This isn't some posh school, it seems to be more half baked than serious. And what a cast of characters! We hear not only from Alex, but a variety of teachers and students. The students run the gamut of teenage personalities, but the adults (other than Alex) are off the chart weird (as you would expect of anyone teaching at a third rate boarding school).
Lutz retains her wicked turn of phrase ability - “Stonebridge May look like Green Gables, but it’s the Bada Bing Club for the preppy set.”
Normally this subject matter wouldn’t enthrall me. Pissy, entitled teenager boys lord it over the girls in the school. But, it just kept me engrossed. I wanted to see if/how the boys got their comeuppance. It’s sad to think that in 2009, the girls are still seen as objects, things to be manipulated. And the ending, well, I couldn’t read that ending fast enough. Wow, wow, wow.
I had one minor quibble with the book. Admittedly, we only see a microcosm of the entire school population, but I can’t believe that a majority of the school officials and teachers would have been willing to turn a blind eye to the goings on.
My thanks to netgalley and Random House- Ballantine for an advance copy of this book.
Rating: really liked it
Dang it. Honestly, it pains me to give this one anything less than a stellar review, as Lisa Lutz is one of my favorite authors, and I credit her Spellman Files series to getting me out of a multi-year reading slump. All that to say, please take this review with a grain of salt, and know full well that I could be the outlier here, due to the fact that I know she can write the heck out of a story.
Perhaps the fact that this one felt so off base from her previous works is what threw me off initially, so the predictable nature of this story left me underwhelmed and unsatisfied. There are
a lot of characters in this story, and it was quite difficult keeping them all straight and determining just why some were even included. I love a good challenge in my reading, but I need for it to have purpose and meaning, not to just be used as a plot device to bloat the page count.
Upon finishing this book, I'm hard pressed to tell you what genre this book technically falls. Overall, I got a heavy YA vibe from the voices of the characters, setting, and plot, yet I'm unsure that this would actually appeal to the YA audience, which could be why I'm waffling around this detail. I guess there is a mystery at hand, but I can guarantee at least half of the reading population will figure it out early and be sorely disappointed at the payoff after such buildup.
Overall, I'm sure you can tell I didn't connect well with this one, but I still hold the author in the highest regard and will continue to search for future work from her. I highly recommend you give this one a try for yourself, as this could be the book for you if the synopsis sounds appealing!
*Many thanks to the publisher for providing my review copy via NetGalley.
Rating: really liked it
At the beginning of this book I thought, "Okay, this clearly takes place in a fictional universe of boarding school novels where we have dropped all pretense that anything in it is real or related to real life." And I was willing to suspend my disbelief for that. Boarding school novels can be campy fun or dark microcosms of teenage misbehavior. I'm down for that. This is a school where the staff is made up of *checks notes* six adults while there are 400 students, though we only ever meet about ten of these students and the rest of them seem to not actually exist. Okay, whatever, let's do it.
Around a third of the way through I thought, "Okay, we're going to get some interesting gender wars here. Maybe this is satire? It could be satire. Nothing in it feels all that satirical but the lack of realism and the committed-to-weirdness plot could mean satire. Let's wait for some sharp topical insight." And I waited.
I should have stopped reading it once I'd given it some more space and still couldn't get my bearings. But I like Lisa Lutz, I've read several of her novels, I thought her last one was her best so far, I figured she had to have something smart waiting for me. But at the end I was just mad enough to want to throw this book.
There does not seem to be much of a point to it all. Teenage boys are terrible. Girls decide to fight back. Things escalate. It's not going to end well. The broad strokes are not exactly new, in this kind of scenario it's all about the details. And the details here never meshed. The teenage boys are so terrible they are irredeemable. We get one as a narrator who helps out the girls and maybe he's supposed to be sympathetic, but he never seems to take any responsibility for his bad actions. (No one takes any responsibility in this book because the terrible teenage boys are capable of such ridiculous revenge that no one dares, which... what??? But I guess that's okay in a book where not only are the teenage boys capable of these dramatic acts of revenge, they are also apparently capable of keeping a secret for years that they also then all decide to stop keeping for the same school assignment? I'm sorry I could do this for HOURS but I will not.) The teachers are truly awful for no real purpose except to maybe remind us that adults are just older teenagers. There is no explanation for so much awfulness, so I guess you could see this as one of those super dark books like Fight Club where everyone is just so totally effed-up that that is the point but this book sure seems to think the girls are at least mostly justified so I don't think that's it either! The teacher who is the closest thing we have to a protagonist is at an odd remove from the action and it's unclear what she even has to do with anything besides give us some B plot.
I do not know why Lutz's usual darkly comic gifts have failed her so utterly here, sometimes a bit would land but none of them ever stuck that landing. And given the amount of manipulation, sexual coercion, sharing of images of underage children, and all on display, it feels like it should all DO something. It should mean something or take you somewhere. We live in a world with so much misogyny, it's not that we don't want some humor with it, it's just that if we're going to get it in our entertainment it's still going to hurt so you have to make it worth it. You have to give us something to believe in or laugh at or get excited about.
To its credit, this book does have a truly excellent flowchart called The Blowchart that they should give out to actual teenagers because it is very good advice.
I do not think this book has much to say that is useful or interesting about feminism or patriarchy or teenage misogyny and manipulation. If you would like a book like that, I would directly you to the very excellent 2018 novel THE RED WORD by Sarah Henstra, which is also about a kind of gender war, this time at a college, that is a very smart and gutsy book that I highly enjoyed and which very much deserves your time.
Rating: really liked it
Although painful to read in some places, due to the horrific actions of a few, this was an amazing book. Clearly 5⭐️ for me!
The message it brings to light is similar to the new form of hazing/bullying that is greatly magnified with social media. But the story is much deeper than the flippant “technology is bad” philosophy. By the end of the story, we learn the origins of the behavior and compliance of many adults, are what has allowed this culture to continue.
This was a fast paced novel and I was completely shocked by the conclusion! The reactions from all characters is so realistic, you could have been reading a current news article concerning a boarding school or college campus.
I highly recommend this book to all YA readers. Due to explicit details, my personal opinion is 14+.
*Many thanks to NetGalley and publishers for the advanced reader’s copy in exchange for my honest review.
Rating: really liked it
In a perfect world, they wouldn’t need to fight. That’s not the world I live in. You can keep telling girls to be polite, to keep a level head and it’ll all work out in the end. But don’t be surprised when they figure out that you’ve been feeding them lies. Don’t be alarmed when they grow tired of using their voices and playing by your rules. And don’t be shocked when they decide that if they can’t win a fair fight, they’ll just have to find another way.
I received an ARC from Ballantine via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I find myself reading more and more fiction by women and POC about topics such as feminism and racism. Call it my personal reaction to the political events of the last few years. Some of these works have been better than others, of course.
The Swallows has been one of the best I’ve read.
As I was reading the story, I was already trying to think about how it’d summarize it in this review when, in a rather meta moment, one of the characters did it for me:
“Son, you’ll never get anywhere if you can’t do a proper elevator pitch. You’re burying the lead. It’s a twisted noir about a bizarre sexual competition that has become the backbone of the social hierarchy at a long-standing boarding school.”
That quotation really sums things up quite nicely. A new teacher, Alex Witt, immediately senses that there’s something deeply wrong at Stonebridge Academy. Alex is a wonderfully written character; trying so hard not to care this time, she’s sarcastic, wry, and damaged. Alex inspires a group of girls, led by Gemma Russo—another sharply written character—to try to change the social order in the school once and for all. The plot builds nicely, well-paced and believable, until events begin to spiral beyond any of the characters’ control.
I can see from other reviews that this book was not loved by all, but I think
The Swallows is a gem, turning the #metoo movement into a noir thriller. Highly recommended.
P.S. The blowchart is so perfect Ballantine should print it on posters and give them to every high school on earth.
Rating: really liked it
"Boys will be boys." I've heard it all my life and wager that you have, too. It's a poor excuse for some of the behavior taking place at Stonebridge Academy. The Darkroom. It's not dark enough to obscure the nasty goings-on there, nor the resultant fallout. A point will be reached when the truth no longer matters, and any lies told are for one's own good. It's high time for a reckoning, and the girls here are sick to death of behaving like proper young ladies.
Rating: really liked it
The axe forgets, but the tree remembers. African Proverb I’ve long been a fan of Lutz’ work. I laughed through her Spellman series, enjoyed her cleverness in
The Last Word and
The Passenger was a wild ride in thriller territory. But this one seems to take everything from all of those previous, the humor, the ingenuity and suspense and raises the bar. This is a revenge story for our times.
You can keep telling girls to be polite, to keep a level head and it’ll all work out in the end. But don’t be surprised when they figure out that you’ve been feeding them lies. Don’t be alarmed when they grow tired of using their voices and playing by your rules. And don’t be shocked when they decide that if they can’t win a fair fight, they’ll just have to fight dirty.Snarky, brainy and just this side of sinister.
Rating: really liked it
Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/
4.5 Stars
“Non ducor, duco. I am not led. I lead.” In what has become a season of mediocre reactions and wrongreading, allow me to take a moment for a book that made me say . . . . .
Lisa Lutz is an author who has been on my radar basically since I became active on Goodreads, but one I avoided in fear of disappointing my Goodreads friends (I did finally buy
The Spellman Files a couple of weeks ago when I found it at HPB clearance event for two bucks so I’m getting closer). When I saw this non-Spellman selection over on NetGalley I figured what the hell. And then I didn’t read it until the dang thing was already published. But whatever. E for effort, right?
Anyway, the only thing I knew about this before going in was the familiarity of the author’s name and . . . .
Stonebridge may look like Green Gables, but it’s like the Bada Bing for the preppy set. 
The plot is pretty simple . . .
“What’s the plan?”
“Build an army, take down the Darkroom, and end Dulcinea.” 
After an eternity of dealing with a “boys will be boys” approach to discipline at Stonebridge Academy, the girls have decided it’s time to take matters into their own hands. What follows is a wickedly delightful tale of revenge. Told from various perspectives including a female teacher, a male teacher, a female student, a male student and the “Announcements,” my
first (EDIT: SECOND - she wrote a chick-litty type of book I read years back and forgot about - Whoops!) experience with Lisa Lutz was a real pageturner. I loved how even though it was technically a boys vs. girls story and 100% a guide to owning your own sexuality as a female and empowerment and yada yada - it was presented without any male bashing. The boys who deserved to be punished got what was coming to them. The boys who did not were a vital part of the story and allies with the girls. My only complaint? It dragged on just a teensie bit too long (others will complain that the ending was totally over-the-top, but it was so awesomely extra it just made me giddy). I also think this should have been marketed as a Young Adult (my definition of YA is generally mid to late teens) book. Even old grannies like me have moved on past instalove. We want edgy, envelope pushing stories when it comes to the young adult genre . . . . .
4.5 Stars, but rounding up because my first reaction to the explanation behind the title was . . . .
And that’s always a good thing.
ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you, NetGalley!
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars
Lisa Lutz was already one of my favorite authors, and this book just further cemented her status. It's her most thought-provoking novel yet. This book stirs up emotions and makes you think which is always a winning combination.
Alexandra Witt takes on a position as a creative writing teacher at Stonebridge Academy. She's curious about something called the Darkroom and starts investigating as it sounds super shady. She soon learns some of the female students aren't too happy with the attitudes and actions of certain male students connected to the Darkroom. Perhaps they can come up with a plan to infiltrate the Darkroom and bring it down once and for all. The story follows the perspectives of Ms Witt, Mr. Finn, a teacher at Stonebridge, Gemma, a senior and leader of the resistance, and Norman, a reluctant participant in the nefarious activities of the Darkroom.
The story incorporate many of the issues of the #metoo movement so this could be a difficult read for some readers. It might seem like the plot is outlandish but yet if I try to pinpoint which parts of the story could never happen in real life, I can't do it. It's both sad and scary that pretty much every plot point, I've actually read about in the news, or at least some variation of it. You might think the whole Darkroom thing sounds crazy but it shares a lot in common with that disturbing colored sex bracelet "game" that found its way into schools not that long ago. The author just shines a light on so many issues and does it in a brilliant way in my opinion.
This book is part of the regular old fiction genre but it does have a slight young adult fiction feel to it. (And I'm not saying that as a negative thing because I think YA fiction is highly underrated.) This is mostly due to the boarding school setting and two of the narrators being students. Maybe it's because I am female, but for me Ms Witt and Gemma were the heart of the story and definitely the characters I identified with the most. And I think Lisa Lutz could have taken the easy way out and had all the female characters act and think the same way but she didn't. It sounds like such a simple thing to show women have minds of their own and their views don't always align with one another but yet I think many authors would not have shown the reality of this fact. The characters in the book were complex, you know, kinda like real people. It's like every detail in this book was so well-thought out, I'm just in awe.
The only teeny, tiny criticism I have is the story felt a tad long at 400 some pages. Although I'm not sure what exactly I would cut out to trim down the length because even the side plots enhanced the overall story. I guess you could also argue the slow pace helped build up the tension.
I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in seeing how a smart and creative writer takes on the issues of the #metoo movement. Readers who liked
The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis might also want to check this book out as well.
Rating: really liked it
Having read and enjoyed a book by Lisa Lutz before I was really expecting to really enjoy The Swallows however that really didn’t turn out to be the case. Just picking this one up I began thinking it has a bit of an identity problem as it felt like a cross between an adult novel and a young adult read.
The main character in The Swallows is actually an adult, Alexandra Witt, who has found herself in the position of needing a new teaching job. This brings Ms. Witt to Stonebridge Academy where after some odd negotiations she ends up with a job teaching creative writing and we as readers get our first glimpse into Stonebridge not exactly being a top ranked academy.
Now as our new teacher sulks into her new position she was not expecting she tosses a random writing prompt at her new class. Well, after being told that the assignment could/would be anonymous some of the students gave answers which lead their new teacher to being concerned with what goes one behind these walls.
Now, as I mentioned I struggled with not calling this one young adult with it being set in a school and then having a good portion of the point of view being handed to the students. It also had such a variety of characters in this story it never really became one I got overly connected to them either and would even mix the POV up even going back to adult. When finished this one ended up with an overall meh feeling somewhat burying it’s better parts.
I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.
For more reviews please visit https://carriesbookreviews.com/
Rating: really liked it
OMG! My eyeballs need a good cleaning as I struggled to finish this book. I got 60% done and I literally could read no more. I read more about oral sex than I ever wanted and the troubles of high school students. This was set in a high school boarding school where a small band of popular male students set up a secret rating system of the oral sex they receive. They even award a secret trophy for the "best" accomplishment.
There is, of course, a teacher that buys them alcohol and a blind eye from the administration. They humiliate females by releasing naked pictures and forcing several girls to leave the school because they are so ashamed. It's truly awful. The catalyst seems to be the arrival of a new teacher whose father is a semi well known author. She joins the girls in uncovering and exposing the plot.
I was even more disappointed as I liked this author's Spellman Files series. This was just awful. I have literally nothing good to say about it.
Thanks to Net Galley for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.
Rating: really liked it
I received a complimentary copy from Random House.
This was a thought-provoking and entertaining read and so much more than just a suspense book.
What do you love? What do you hate? What do you want? This is the writing prompt from Alex Witt, the new creative writing teacher at Stonebridge Academy boarding school. The students answers bring out some disturbing revelations. There’s a social hierarchy at school that involves “The Darkroom.” Ms. Witt unifies the girls at the school into a resistance movement (along the lines of “Me, too”), but then she’s outed with a dark secret of her own.
Secrets are coming out from every crack and crevice at the school while tensions between the boys and girls are rising to a mounting level. Someone may get hurt. Oh, and girls may be girls when they’ve had enough of boys being boys. I LOVED the empowerment here. I loved the themes. There was clever humor sprinkled in to keep this from being overwhelmingly dark. The Swallows is a smart and timely thriller.
Many of my reviews can also be found on instagram: www.instagram.com/tarheelreader
Rating: really liked it
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Filed Under: Blow jobs weren’t on the curriculum
This is a popular read with high ratings on Goodreads from other reviewers, but my overall opinion is basically WHAT THE FUCK THIS IS REALLY DUMB. Sorry.
I don’t mind being one of only a few people going against the grain here, but honestly, I just can’t even with this book. I had to suspend disbelief in such an extreme way that I started to feel legit angry about it. Also, lightheaded.
This was 400 pages about girls at a boarding school going all Sally Field-Norma Rae with shaved heads because they’ve somehow fallen into a secret game of giving blow jobs for points to all the popular boys at the school who have a yearly championship bracket.
All of the teaching staff knows kind of (the six of them running a school of hundreds of students,) but turn a blind eye because…I guess…rich parents? Or college admissions? Or reputation? Or whatever else rich people care about. Someone ask Lori Laughlin. I’m still a little fuzzy on why full-grown, educated adults dedicated to America’s youth would be all elbow patches and tweed, and please ignore our student sex ring.
I mean, there must have been a way to stop the abuse without putting “ran a blow job side-hustle his senior year” on school transcripts. Then again, maybe Yale would call it entrepreneurship.
While no one appreciates feminist themes with a #metoo movement vibe more than I do, this feels like Lutz just never found her footing with those big themes and what I ended up reading was kind of ridiculous.
When new teacher, Alex Witt, gives the first assignment to her creative writing class, all of the ” I HATE BLOW JOBS” secret messages are revealed and Ms. Witt becomes very suspicious of the number of girls wishing for blow jobs to cease to exist, so she starts a little investigation. Soon, there are secret videos of her meant to be threats, footprints around her cabin like she’s being stalked and all the other teachers are like, “Blow jobs? What blow jobs competition? Stop talking about blow jobs! What even are blow jobs? Girl, you are wild!”
And Ms. Witt is all…
Ms. Witt decides to lend her feminist expertise to the group of girls who have secretly mobilized to bring down the blow job nonsense. Witt even creates a handy flowchart for them about when/how you should give a blow job. She calls it a Blowchart (one star has been awarded in my review just for that,) and it basically goes: “DON’T GIVE BLOWJOBS UNLESS YOU WANT TO.”
And all the girls are like…
While I’ve never read Lisa Lutz before, I do know she is lauded for her darkly comedic writing voice so I kept waiting for this novel to turn into a satire, but it persisted in its desire to be a very serious novel that now I’m just confused. The plot is straight-up ridiculous; weird and nonsensical and requires so much suspension of disbelief that anything like this would ever happen that I couldn’t get into it.
And I really should have been able to because it feels like Lutz wanted to make an actual point about current sex culture and women’s sexual agency. We’re talking about underage girls and blackmail and the idea of nude pictures, misogyny, sexual coercion and manipulation basically between
children, and yet nothing really comes of it. There’s no broader theme or point.
The adults are terrible morons without explanation, and the events all strung together don’t make a lot of sense. And that subplot with Witt’s father? Ugh. CUT. IT. OUT.
The girls at Stonebridge Academy have lived in such constant fear of the blow job ring for so long because if they expose the boys the revenge would be like so horrific the girls would never recover? Or what? So they just keep sucking undesirable dick and chopping down trees about it, never telling anyone for fear of nude pictures leaking… but that would literally be distribution of child porn in most cases. No adult is going to point that out?
There’s a computer wizard doing some serious work with secret servers and shit for the Blow Job Bandits (not their actual club name) so that they can keep their criminal enterprise secret forever! In fact, everyone has been keeping this blow job secret for YEARS, but then some new teacher gives the kids a random creative writing assignment and suddenly they’re all like, GOTTA GET AN A+ and reveal all the blow jobs!!
Then the girls are meeting in secret, plotting the blow job clubs’ demise like they’re the resistance in 1940s Nazi Germany. I just…
From a purely technical standpoint, there are way too many characters in this book. It reaches critical levels for this reader. It was hard to keep track of who everyone was, who knew who, who had blown who and who knew what. And I fucking hate that shit.
Genre-wise, I don’t know why this is labelled as a mystery-thriller, but it’s not. Parts of it feel like a contemporary trying to make a serious point about patriarchy and feminism and sexual freedom, and then other parts feel like it’s written about teenagers for teenagers. The teenage characters didn’t resonate with me as a 30-something and I doubt the adult parts would resonate with a YA audience.
Honestly, I don’t know who this book is for, but judging by the number of stellar reviews it has, it doesn’t really matter what I think.
My second star is given purely because of the blow job scene with the hot peppers because that was fucking hilarious.
Otherwise, this is a pointless book for me. It didn’t make any points that would add to the consent conversation in a meaningful way. The plot was full of logic holes to such a degree that I was developing a twitch in my left eye and it’s not the mystery/thriller it was marketed as.
So….
*fart noises*⭐⭐ | 2 stars.
