Welcome Back, Booklovers! I loved Alexis Henderson's debut The Year of the Witching and I even interviewed her for this blog back in 2020. And although House of Hunger left me disappointed I was interested in seeing what she did next in the fantasy space. I didn't get the chance to read before release but when my library hold came through I pushed aside the rest of my TBR to jump right in. So keep reading for my full thoughts.
Lennon Carter is a 24 year old woman who has recently gotten out of a bad relationship where she lost herself and her ambition to playing housewife. With her acceptance to Drayton College, she is given the chance to start over. Drayton is a mysterious University located in Savannah, Georgia but also invisible to and undetectable to those outside of it's campus. Here Lennon discovers she and other students have the power of Persuasion and she starts working closely with Dr. Dante Lowe to cultivate and control those abilities.
The first half of this book moved very slowly as far as plot progression but we also didn't get much character progression either. Which made the book feel like it was attempting to coast on vibes only. Having read Catherine House, another novel set at an elite university with mysterious things happening unbeknownst to students and a rather passive mc; I felt like that book did a better job with showcasing how students can easily become seduced by that environment. It helps that that book is a lot more descriptive. Everything is presented so vaguely here right down to character descriptions. Characters are defaulted to white unless stated otherwise and usually described with vague features like a shaved head or blonde hair or having an Antebellum accent. Even the descriptions of Lennon and Dante do little to paint an image of them in my mind.
"Lennon couldn't place his race but could tell that, like her, he was mostly Black but mixed with something else. White, maybe?"
What was odd to me was that race never really comes up in regards to how she navigates this environment aside from a time when Lennon feels her position at the school is threatened. And even that was very briefly.
Lennon's actions were confusing. She comes to campus ready to start anew but on the first night has sex with a random student on the main concourse. This person is never presented as a potential love interest and we're too assume she was just trying to get over her ex Wyatt but the only time it's addressed again is as a way to slut shame her. We're told later on in the story Lennon has a history of promiscuity but there's never any explanation given for why. Why does she fall into sexual relationships with authority figures and codependency? We're told she doesn't have the best relationship with her family but again there's no explanation for what happened between them. Even when readers do finally meet her family on page they seem relatively normal but Lennon can't wait to escape them.
The book focuses so much on building this slow burn relationship with Lennon and Dante while dancing around the power imbalance. She's infatuated well before he ever makes a move on her and other students notice he treats her differently. But despite the slow build we little to nothing from them aside from him helping her learn to wield her powers. I wish Alexis Henderson would've leaned in more and had Dante actually seducing Lennon. Lennon was acting as if she was his girlfriend well before he even touched her which wasn't until the last quarter of the book. I had to keep reminding myself she's supposed to be this experienced woman in her mid 20s because she read like a naive girl fresh out of high school.
The implications on the magic of Persuasion and its effects on the world are never outside of the campus are never realized. Details about the school's overall purpose and the way in which it affects society outside of the school are glossed over.
If you're looking for a sweeping campus fantasy with lots of world building I suggest passing on this one. With both this book and House of Hunger it felt like Henderson had unique ideas but wasn't sure how to develop them into a plot and rushed to tie those ideas together at the end. Where House of Hunger relied mostly on skin crawling descriptions this relies on shock value after shock value reveal dominating the second half of the story. The reveals feel unearned because there's no build up and the few answers we get still leave questions. It felt like a tv show that was greenlit because of it's cool premise but then the writers were unsure how to execute it beyond the initial first episodes and started throwing things in to see what resonates with viewers.
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