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I feel like I haven’t treated Tananarive Due with enough respect.

The Reformatory is the third of her books that I’ve read. I did not know that until just now! I remember reading her book My Soul To Keep way back in 2016, and at the time I really liked it, but for some reason every time I think of it now I feel like it wasn’t something I enjoyed. And I just discovered that I read her debut novel, The Between, in 2020.

When I tell you that I don’t remember anything about that book, I need you to understand that not only do I not remember any details about the story, I did not even remember the book existed. That cover looks unfamiliar. I cannot picture where my copy of it is in my house, and I surely read a print copy. I don’t know what the spine looks like. If you had asked me ten minutes ago what the name of Tananarive Due’s debut novel was, I would not have been able to tell you. My recall of books from years ago is not always great, I admit that, mostly because I read 100+ books a year. But forgetting a book existed or that I ever read it at all is not a thing that I do.

And that after my weird about-face on My Soul to Keep? I have no explanation for this phenomenon.

Anyway, The Reformatory is really good, and if six months from now I find that I’ve turned on it too, I’m gonna need someone to come get me.

The Reformatory is the story of Robert Stephens Jr., a 12-year-old boy who is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys for a supposed six-month sentence after kicking the son of a wealthy white man in the knee. The book is set in 1950 in Florida, thick in the middle of Jim Crow, and the Gracetown “school” is a segregated, haunted nightmare, run by a grotesque abomination of a man. It is widely understood that Robert won’t be getting out in six months, as the warden is renowned for finding excuses to hold on to any boy sent to him until their 21st birthday regardless of their original sentence. Beatings and torture are commonplace and the ~~inmates~~ ~~prisoners~~ “students” are encouraged to turn on each other at any opportunity.

The book bounces back and forth between Robert’s story and his sister, who Robert was defending when he kicked the other boy. She is trying her best to get him released, which is easier said than done in any number of ways. Their father has fled to Chicago after his attempts at unionization upset the Klan, and it’s fairly clear that part of the reason Robert is being treated as poorly as he is is because the authorities can’t get at his father.

The book would be scary enough without the haints, is what I’m saying, and the presence of a large number of ghosts at Gracetown becomes almost a distraction from all of the more grounded evil taking place there. Of course, a number of them are ghosts of children who were murdered or otherwise died while incarcerated there, and, well, a whole bunch of them bear quite a serious grudge against the warden.

I won’t go into much more detail, because (as usual for books I enjoyed) you deserve to experience the twists and turns on your own, but this really is a hell of a book, and I’ve not heard a lot of people talking about it. Give it a read.

(Rin Chupeco, autocorrect! Rin! Sorry about the typo in the headline.)

Let’s start with this: I apparently have no idea what makes a book YA, and I’m starting to think it really is code for “a fantasy book written by a woman” or, worse, “a book starring a young person,” without regard for content. Sarah Maas is the best example of this, as the later books in the Throne of Glass series include fairly copious amounts of highly detailed sex, and Rin Chupeco’s The Girl from the Well is not only scary as hell but drops a “motherfucker” pretty early on in the text, and while it’s not super sweary in general it’s also not especially shy.

Not, mind you, that any of this is a bad thing, just that if you’re an adult and you generally avoid books with “YA” or “Teen” in their descriptors you probably ought to stop doing that, because it really does seem to be pretty meaningless as a category most of the time. This particular book doesn’t even involve a love triangle, which does seem to be a bit of a trope. No romance at all, actually.

No, what The Girl from the Well gives you is that rarest of things, to the point where I can only come up with a few examples: a genuinely scary book. I’ve read one other book by this author before and I didn’t especially take to it, but The Girl from the Well is squarely in my damn wheelhouse: a supernatural tale of possession, and evil spirits, and revenge, and murder, and to make things even more interesting it’s narrated by one of the ghosts, which was just a phenomenal way to approach the story, especially since the ghost isn’t quite sane. Chupeco uses this trick where she occasionally

uses

her line breaks

for emphasis,

and it wouldn’t work very well with a traditional narrator, but for an angry ghost it’s startlingly effective. You may be getting strong The Ring vibes from the cover, and there’s a good reason for that, as both The Girl in the Well and The Ring are based on the same Japanese myth, so there’s a very similar vibe, and if The Ring creeped you out this book is absolutely going to as well.

I pulled a move for this book that is really only possible when ordering books online, as I actually screwed up and bought the sequel, which is called The Suffering, first, because I didn’t realize it was a sequel. So I had to order this and just sort of hope that I’d want to end up reading both of them, which ended up working out great, since I don’t have to wait for it to get here now. I’m going straight into it, so we might have another review for that book in a day or two.

This is a great read, especially with Halloween coming up. Give it a look, and don’t let the YA tag mess with you. I promise I’m grown, and I loved it.