Containing all the minutiae of a folktale, a fairy story and a Greek bacchanalian tragedy, The Ophelia Girls was brilliantly good. I took so many notes on my phone and sent so many videos of myself to my friends talking about this book... I simply couldn’t get over it.

T.O.G was a myriad of myth and mundanity, a moonlit, riverdeep confession of illicit desires and a splintering mother-daughter dynamic. Ruth is bound to her 16-year-old self and her narrative reflects this as she flits between past and present. For Mauve, her 17-year-old daughter recovering from leukaemia, rebellion becomes flesh in Stuart, a friend of her parent’s. With dreamy, atmospheric, gothic prose, Healey draws us into a shimmering spiderweb of sexuality and the wildness of girlhood. There was a real sense of adult regression as Healey writes, “Maybe he is as stuck in his teenage past as I am, leashed to it.”

I adored the Shakespearean, Classic influence of this book as the Persephonic motif flirts with the past and present, the person in question an object of secret desire for Ruth and Stuart. Fire-headed Ophelia stands as a symbol of the thirsty power of infatuation and remained a figure of inspiration for the young women.

Provocative and velvety, I was privy to the inner workings of a woman’s mind as one projects romance onto a man many years her senior, and the other reflects on the balmy days of her teenage summer where life & death mingled ever so violently. The relationship between Mauve and Stuart unsettled me and it was this unconventional bond that knocked off half a star. However, this was a gorgeously bewitching read and I cannot recommend it enough.

4.5⭐️

Many thanks to the publisher for my ARC in exchange for review
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My thanks to Jane Healey, Pan Macmillen and Net Galley. For the Arc of THE OPHELIA GIRLS.
I assume the feeling we were to take away from this novel is what was thought of as forbidden love in the 70s. But the correlation between the two, Ruth's attraction to girls and Maeve and Stuart's hidden sexual encounters could in no way be compared. Some very uncomfortable reading here but the writing of it to a high standard as would be expected.

A strange read. Some very uncomfortable reading here about so called love - one with a man and a young girl. Nah it was all a bit weird. I did feel that I was back at school and that any minute now the teacher or other students are going to start talking about it, detailing the underlying messages, symbols, meaning behind it all.