Excitingly this month we’ve been gifted signed copies of The Four by Ellie Keel to read, courtesy of her publisher. Frankly this is the most attractive book we’ve ever read, with a gorgeous hot pink cover and painted page ends. They say not to judge a book by its cover, but this one definitely raised several oohs and aahs when colleagues picked up their copies to read.
The Four is billed as an academia noir novel, a thriller set in a prestigious boarding school and following the fates of The Four, all brilliant sixth form scholarship students tasked with navigating the politics, bullies, and rules of their new school. Told by Rose, the story centres around her roommate and fellow outsider student Marta, and their male counterparts Sami and Lloyd. A full set of boarding school cliches is included: teachers called Mags, a mean Queen Bee bully (Genevieve), a Senior Patrol enforcing the rules, and the bullying of the newcomers. There are secrets and a few twists and it did keep us reading until the end of the book to find out what happened, but it wasn’t an easy read for those of us at the reading group meeting.
We used words like unsettling, not believable, uncomfortable, indignant, triggering. The book covered with themes that we might not have chosen to read about, such as self-harm, violent bullying and assault. Quite a lot of the story relied on events that we didn’t find believable. One of our readers commented that they got to the end of the book and didn’t know what they were meant to have got out of reading it.
All in all, not our favourite read!
Next month we’ll be reading Half a world away from Mike Gayle. A former Richard and Judy Book Club read, this is the story of Kerry and Noah, sibling separated as children and now living very different lives.
Pick up a book in the Library in GETEC!
Find out more about our reading groups here
Take a look at the blog posts for our previous reads here.
