Book Review: An Academy For Liars by Alexis Henderson
Lennon Carter’s life is falling apart. It’s the night of her engagement party and she’s miserable, the inescapable sense of unease and dissociation with her identity only growing stronger as she gets closer to the wedding. The not-entirely unexpected discovery that her fiancé has been unfaithful is the final nail in the coffin. Lennon leaves the party and drives away with the intention of ending things forever, only to be halted by a strange intervention – a mysterious phone call inviting her to sit the entrance exam for a college few have heard of.
Arriving at Drayton College, a school of magic hidden in a secret pocket of Savannah, Lennon learns that she’s been chosen because – like everyone else at the school – she possesses the innate gift of persuasion, not just with minds but with matter itself. Passing the gruelling exam is just the first obstacle, and keeping her position relies on Lennon mastering this miraculous and dangerous power. Whilst persuasion takes a heavy toll on her body and mind, she’s captivated by the college campus, her gifted classmates and its influential faculty, particularly Dante, her intimidating yet charismatic adviser. But as Lennon becomes more adept at wielding her abilities, she uncovers more about Drayton’s unsettling history and her part to play in its continued existence.
…intervention was exactly what she wanted. A sign, a symbol, the grasping hand of some meddling but benevolent god who would reach down through a break in the clouds and shake her senseless, until she was forced to believe—really and truly—that her life had meaning and that she was destined for something more than mediocrity.“
With her previous books, The Year of the Witching and House of Hunger, Alexis Henderson proved herself to be an author with a unique talent for writing raw and sinister gothic horror with an unsettling sense of permeating dread. An Academy For Liars is no different, swapping tales of feminist witchcraft and sapphic vampiric fantasy for a dark academia setting that pulses with an underlying malevolence. Henderson creates a tense atmosphere of elitism, rivalry and suspicion, not just between the competing students who are all vying to be top of the class, but between the students and professors too. The faculty hold all the power but that doesn’t mean they can be trusted, as Lennon quickly discovers.
Whilst falling under the wider dark academia umbrella, this is a novel that blurs the lines between genres – it’s part gruesome, visceral horror, part heartrending, betrayal-leaden romance, with some speculative time travel elements. It’s also in many ways a coming-of-age novel. Lennon is in her early twenties, though she carries the emotional baggage and world-weariness of someone a lot older. As she learns about the breadth and importance of her individual power, she learns about herself as a person too, chiefly what’s important to her, and what she’ll do to hold on to those things. She’s a complex character, matched only by Dante, whose violent, tragic past slowly unravels as the novel nears its end.
If you’re a self-confessed glutton for flawed and tortured characters with tragic histories and fateful futures (it’s me, I’m the glutton), An Academy For Liars wholeheartedly delivers with Lennon and Dante. Yet there’s always a thread of hope, however small, that keeps them both going – something that readers can hold on to as the story gets darker and more devastating. And when it comes to the final chapter, Henderson couldn’t have written a more beautifully bittersweet end. It’s the kind of writing you sit with for a while, breathing in all the subtle details – the simplicity of the dialogue, the power of the emotions simmering just under the surface – before finally closing the book.
★★★★
An Academy For Liars was published by Bantam on 24 October 2024
