Review by: Paige
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
I received an advanced copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. Thank you so much to Wednesday Books for providing this galley!
Publication: March 15, 2022
Genre: Young Adult, Paranormal, Mystery, Thriller
Synopsis: Lyrical and haunting, Hannah Capin’s I Am Margaret Moore is a paranormal thriller that tests the hold of sisterhood and truth.
I am a girl. I am a monster, too.
Each summer the girls of Deck Five come back to Marshall Naval School. They sail on jewel-blue waters; they march on green drill-fields; they earn sunburns and honors. They push until they break apart and heal again, stronger.
Each summer Margaret and Rose and Flor and Nisreen come back to the place where they are girls, safe away from the world: sisters bound by something more than blood.
But this summer everything has changed. Girls are missing and a boy is dead. It’s because of Margaret Moore, the boys say. It’s because of what happened that night in the storm.
Margaret’s friends vanish one by one, swallowed up into the lies she has told about what happened between her and a boy with the world at his feet. Can she unravel the secrets of this summer and last, or will she be pulled under by the place she once called home?
Review: If you know me well at all, I probably tried to shove Hannah Capin’s Foul Is Fair down your throat at some point in the last two years or so. It quickly became one of my favorite books of all time, and I fell head-over-heels in love with Capin’s trademark lyricism and her raw, fierce depictions of girlhood, privilege, and revenge. So when I heard about I Am Margaret Moore, I was ravenous. I needed my hands on it ASAP. And I feel incredibly indebted to the incredible Wednesday Books team for sending it my way—because I was blown away by the twisting, turning, confounding, lyrical, haunting, and unexpected novel that I met in its pages.
To say nearly anything about this book would be to spoil the journey it takes you on—and a journey it was. From the start, you are met with a narrator mired in chaos, thrown into confusions so completely that it takes a full 25% of the novel for you to wrap your head around what’s happening. But rather than detract from the story being told, the chaos Capin embraces in her prose only enhances the effect of the novel. Some have bemoaned the repetitions and the ping-ponging between timelines, and while it could be a bit much at times, such a style creates a glitch effect—creates prose that reads like, dare I say it, its own haunting. I beg you to flow with the writing, not against it—many of our most foundational ghost stories have been confusing. While I do wonder if not catching on early to the story that is being told and who it is being told by would impact the efficacy of this novel, I put the pieces together slowly but surely, and by the time I was confident that I knew what it was doing, what big twist would be coming down the line, I was in the palm of this book’s hand. It is an ensnaring, puzzling tale.
While I do wish that there had been more engagement with the setting of the Naval School itself (though there was more than enough jargon to sift through), as the setting is always-already entrenched in the military industrial complex, I was more than content to follow the story that Margaret Moore was demanding for herself, that Capin was demanding for you to read—one of personhood.
If I had just one comparison to make here, I would tell you that this novel is a thunderclap. A striking, pounding, loud and honest novel about girlhood and forced womanhood, choice and the absence of it, sisterhood and revenge, power and privilege and voice, ghosts and manifestations of grief. It is a truly, actually thrilling paranormal thriller. There really is very little I can say about the plot of this book and what is contained within it. But know that the book is the prose is the story—and it will beg you to read it.
“I am a poet and a dreamer and a girl who sees the good in everyone, and I am a monster too.”
YA Books Daily 