This started off with a fairly attention grabbing first sentence ("It would have made our lives a lot easier if Marta had simply pushed Genevieve out of our bedroom window on our third day at High Realms. Certainly, it would have been tragic.") and then kinda fell flat on its face.

This dark academia book takes place in High Realms were we follow 4 scholarship students as they navigate their way around the children of the elite in British society. It's a tale of loyalty, friendship & the lengths you go to protect the people you love.

For the majority of this book you need to suspend your belief so you can buy into the fact that three 16/17 year olds can successfully hide another teenager for 5 months. A teenager who is wanted by the police for hitting a fellow student that results in a severe accident and in a room in a busy stables that no-one who works at the school knows about. It's a leap to say the least.

The pacing was too slow for my taste and it's not really a thriller more of a story into one person's slow descent into madness through loneliness, abuse & no support for her very obvious MH issues set in an elite boarding school.

I don't know if I enjoyed it, or endured it bit I will certainly read another by the author as the story was good but maybe mis-advertised as a dark academia thriller rather than just dark.

Four scholarship students join High Realms, a prestigious boarding school, and The Four follows their dark and twisty time….
I went through a bit of a rollercoaster with the Four. At first I wasn’t sure, I didn’t think it was for me; dark academia has never really been a genre I’ve gelled with. Then all of a sudden it grabbed me and I was tearing through the pages….but I was getting really cross with the characters. By the end I decided I would just go with it, and threw myself into it wholeheartedly! Dark, intense and very readable.

I started reading The Four with great anticipation as I love books set in schools and an elite boarding school, even better. However, the continuous, gratuitous bullying and torture just turned my stomach. I'm not normally a squeamish person and love a bit of gore in my thrillers but this just went too far. I tried to finish the book and got over half way but had to give up. I'm sure other readers will love it but not for me this time sorry.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy. All opinions are my own.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book however I feel a little confused. It’s left me still not quite knowing. I felt it was a little dark and mysterious with a bit of spooky in the mix … it took me a while to get into it and had some very hateful characters. It’s raw and compelling but somehow I still feel let down. It’s defiantly dramatic and has some shock aspects and there’s a lot happening at once rather than further developing a plot I feel. The opening line drew me in, I’m not sure how I feel about the ending … maybe it just wasn’t for me.

Thank you to NetGalley, Ellie Keel and the publisher for an advanced copy for my review.

It took me a while to finish this book because it made me really angry.

Firstly this needs to come with trigger warnings because it contains strong themes of child sexual abuse and rape.

The story is told through the lens of Rose, one of 4 young people gifted a scholarship to a boarding school. Rose, Marta, Sami, and Lloyd are not accepted from the very beginning and are bullied. Marta especially despite being bright and funny is bullied without measure and what happened to her made me so angry i felt like she was a real person, on that score the author won because i was so upset about what happens to her.

I am a counsellor in real life so i see this from a different view, but what the author did to Marta was beyond cruel. It was torture, she was already traumatised, then she shoved her into solitary confinement essentially for the best part of a year, had her raped again and then in the end gave her an ending that had me screaming obsenities at my kindle. Why didnt anyone get her help? They left her to suffer and even now i am haunted by the memory of what she must have suffered in that clocktower day after day after day. I know she is a fictional character but i am haunted by it.

I dont feel that Rose was a good person, she got a happy ending but didnt deserve it. With the exception of Sami none of them had empathy for Marta and it made me cry. I also didnt buy the relationship with Rose and Sylvia. It made no sense at all and seemed to just be shoved in there for edi purposes.

I would have liked to have given it a higher score but it wasnt just dark it was cruel and it made me cry. So much so in fact that i couldnt read another book for a week after because i was so angry with literature as a whole.

I was really looking forward to reading The Four especially after reading the book description. Unfortunately it wasn’t one I loved. The characters were difficult to feel any connection to and the ending fell flat.. sometimes it’s more about my mood rather than the book and there are so many reviews that praise this book so on this occasion I think its a case of the right book but the wrong time.

Rose,Marta, Sami and Lloyd have arrived at High Realms, one of the countrys leading boarding schools. They are scholarship students in a school that is made up of the children of rich and influential people. They are bright and ambitious students and that doesn't go down well with everyone. They encounter all that the school offers, the education, the extra curricular things, including drinking and sex, but also bullying and cruel pranks. It all comes to a head with an accident and the disappearance of Marta.
This style of book is not my usual read but I did enjoy it. It details the relationships between these four students and those around them very well, some of them very unexpected. At times it is quite dark and some of the situations are a bit far fetched but that lends itself to the story. I did feel sorry for the four as they fought their way through some adult situations and I wanted them to all come out safe and well.
Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for granting me an advance copy.

This book offers a unique and compelling reading experience, guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat from start to finish.

The Four is an interesting read by Ellie Keel.
I found this book entertaining and interesting. I found it a little slow sometimes but I still enjoyed the book. It had a good story and. Good cast of characters. I recommend it.
❤️ Thank you to netgalley and the author/ publisher for my arc ebook copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This was a relatively short read centred around the dangers and politics at an upper-class boarding school. Although there wasn't a "plot" as such, in the sense that there was no grand adventure and the characters themselves didn't change much throughout the story, it was still an interesting read that had many realistic, gritty moments that left me horrified and/or upset. The twist at the ending had me feeling morose for days afterwards, and the epilogue was bittersweet yet satisfying. If you enjoy darker novels that reveal the unspoken-about side of upper-class teenagers, then this is the book for you!

I was looking forward to reading this novel, everything I had seen on social media hyped it / me up for a dark academia novel which would blow If We Were Villains out of the water. Sadly this novel did not deliver. Whilst Dark Academia characters tend to be on the morally grey side, and sometimes difficult to root for, none of the characters here really captivated my interest. They all seemed fairly vapid and irritating. The plot did have all of the DA elements, but the plot twist failed to surprise, and due to a lack of solid characterisation, the reader almost fails to care.

I've been loving books set in private/boarding schools lately, but this one wasn't really one for me.

The pace was quite slow and with the chapter lengths, I feel like it took me so long to read.

I do feel like the synopsis was a tiny bit misleading, and the story I was reading didn't match up to its intriguing synopsis.

Four scholarship students begin the new term at a prestigious boarding school; they are not welcome and so begins a term of victimisation, rituals and rules that ends in a horrific series of events. Full of longstanding petty prejudices and bound by alliances, an elite set rule over the other students. Marta and Rose bond quickly, but no matter what Rose, Lloyd and Sami try, Marta finds it impossible to connect to her new surroundings outside of their group.
Immediately the book sets you up in the knowledge that something bad is going to happen, we only get Rose's perspective, so we don’t understand Marta, her background, thoughts and motives are hidden from us. You sense that Rose has a lot of guilt about what happened and is writing it down as some kind of therapy. It is a brutal story of bullying, abuse and rape but also one of love and friendship.

Dark academia is fast becoming my favourite genre, and The Four by Ellie Keel is a great addition to the list. I was drawn into the story very quickly and the pace is unrelenting.

This ARC was gifted by netgalley.

I'd give this a 3.5 stars. It's an interesting commentary on what goes on behind closed doors at prestigious boarding schools and the secrets they surround themselves in.

I feel that Marta and Rose were the most fleshed out characters although Rose's naivete often ground my gears. For a friendship group who were proclaimed to be so close, there were many things that Rose was shut out of, which felt contrived and convenient for 'plot purposes'.

I felt the boys were much less fleshed out, Sami in particular, whose entire character seemed to be self-righteousness and falling in love with any woman that spoke to him.

The plot itself I felt was engaging and kept you interested with the various twists and turns. I do feel that Marta's past trauma was hinted at so often that it was obvious what had happened before it was explicitly revealed. I wasn't sure if this was a deliberate choice to reflect how often people do have a gut feeling about something but don't ask further questions because they don't want to know the truth.

I was disappointed by the end of the book. It felt hugely anticlimactic and made the rest of the book almost pointless. There were more interesting dynamics that could have been explored instead which would have pushed my rating up.

(rounded up from 4.5 stars)

HELLO EVERYONE NEEDS TO GO AND GET THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW! it was such a fantastic debut and i enjoyed it so much. ellie keel has such a talent for writing and i really cannot wait to see where she goes next in the future. she is an author to WATCH!

this was such a refreshing and unique book to read. what caught my eye was that it was marketed towards those who loved the secret history and if we were villains (and if you know me, you know i adore those books). if i had to pick one word to describe this book, i would pick: divine. the writing was divine, the plot was divine and the pacing was divine. i did not find myself bored within this book at all and i hope that it gets the hype that it deserves when it publishes.

Different to the usual books I read.
Four scholarship students join a prestigious fee paying school and suffer trials and tribulations as they try to fit in.
They experience abuse and bulling but each have their own life traumas and so do several of those who bully them.
The result is a mix of friendship under extreme circumstances and misguided loyalties and mistakes in the confined environment of boarding away from family and friends.
Very thought provoking and disturbing.
Well worth reading but not a comfortable read.

I was so intrigued by this book as soon as I heard about it and I’m so so glad that I got the chance to read it thanks to NetGalley! It was such a gripping and intense dark academia story with plenty of love guilt and revenge thrown in! I could not put this down after I started it, couldn’t wait to get into bed each night and read more and more! The characters were interesting and developed well, the plot and the scenes were very immersive and dark and overall it was just a fabulously thrilling read! Definitely recommend!

THE FOUR is a thriller with dark academia vibes where a pressure cooker school with a culture of bullying among students and staff and a few bad decisions spiral into a disaster.

This is a tragedy. There's a sense of things getting worse and worse, spiralling out of control once there are too many lies, too many secrets for the characters to feel like they can stop what's happening and own up. And yet you know it will come out eventually, and so are wondering how much of a disaster that will be when it does.

While there is a sense of "this would not happen", the whole thing feels like a surreal dream that's too engaging to not know how it ends (hoping against hope that you're wrong about the potential for tragedy!) There's something so compelling at spirals that both feel inevitable and also like they could so easily get out of it if they can just break character for once and tell the truth.

While this is set in a prestigious (and awful - some many safe guarding issues!) boarding school, I wouldn't class it as a dark academia. The motive at the core of the book, the goals spurring characters on, and major plot lines don't feature academic/research obsession (which is my core dark academia requirement.)

While this is happening at a secondary school with teenagers, it does not feel like a YA novel. The themes and the darkness are not handled in the way you expect from YA, approaching it much more within the framing of an adult looking back on it, so the emotional approach is older.

This book is based around 4 students who live in a boarding school together.

As their relationships are shown, we see that there are tensions in the friendships within the four.
The four main characters are well thought out....they are a compelling group and the author has portrayed the differences between them very well.
As things start to happen between the four, a dark secret binds them all together but will it be uncovered....and if it is, how does it end?

A thriller of a book.