Book Review: A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee

A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I bought this book a long-ish time ago, and reading it now for a reading challenge made me grateful to get it (because if I didn't, I'd be running around with my head chopped off trying to find this book) and when I say that I enjoyed this book friends, I ENJOYED IT. I enjoyed it so much that I wrote down so many quotes that screamed at me to write because it was so good. I wanted to go to Dalloway and spend time with the girls from Godwin House and go to their little Night Migration sessions and just have fun, and also before Felicity because that's how much I truly enjoyed and adored this book.

I wasn't keen on Felicity at first, with the story sounding all kinds of weird and not right when she talked about her dead girlfriend Alex Haywood, thinking that either she or Margery had come back to haunt her. She came back to school to finish up her high school diploma, and during her time in school, she met the rest of the Godwin House Girls and the one and only Ellis Haley.

Ellis Haley was a prolific writer who wanted to write about the Dalloway Five, five young witches who had died quite horribly. Felicity, who once upon a time was obsessed with the story and with witches and witchcraft, didn't want anything to do with Ellis's project. But she got roped into it, and soon enough she was helping Ellis with how some of these young women die, along with trying to straighten out her own mind and to also find out what really happened with Alex.

One night, she and Ellis went to Alex's grave, and Felicity knew that there was nothing in her grave-in fact, she knew that the grave was empty. Ellis offered to dig it up, and Felicity told her no. Instead, that's when Ellis gave her The Secret Garden to read to Alex, and the next morning the book showed up, along with a piece of hellebore in the middle-the hellebore that grew on Alex's grave.

At this point, I thought that it was suspicious that The Secret Garden showed up, along with the hellebore, but then things just started getting weirder and weirder and weirder, to the point that Felicity went back to Alex's grave, dug it up, and found Clara there, dead.

I was shocked too when I read it.

Scared out of her mind, she went to talk to Ellis about it...who, it turned out, killed Clara the same way one of the Dalloway girls was killed. Then the final showdown between Felicity and Eliis, which didn't end well, and at the funeral, Ellis's mothers tried to give Felicity her book, but she turned it down. Years later, Felicity came in contact with the book again in London, and when she read the thing in the beginning of the book I cannot remember, she quickly shuts the book and goes to her flat with her girlfriend.

I truly enjoyed this book so much. I want to read it all over again because of how good it was. It had the dark academia vibes along with the queer ones that I really loved.


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