Kirkus Reviews

"This intriguing and intricate story is a winner."

The second book in the Rosenholm Trilogy, which is translated from Danish, reunites readers with magical boarding school students Malou, Chamomile, Kirstine, and Victoria as they try to discover a murderer's identity.

The girls’ second year at Rosenholm Academy has begun, and the friends are back together in their dorm. They’re determined to find out who killed Trine, the former Rosenholm student who vanished in 1989; her ghost manifested to Victoria in Roses & Violets (2023). After Trine writes “SAY SORRY” on Victoria’s fogged-up bathroom mirror, the girls work to decipher this cryptic message, leading them to Trine’s childhood home and her previously unknown sister, an odd, possibly dangerous recluse.

Kappel Jensen weaves imaginative descriptions of the magical lessons (the girls’ studies include intriguing Norse and Celtic mythology) into a good old-fashioned whodunit, and the story adroitly deepens each girl’s character while forging new connections among the cast members. Romantic and sexual desires are integrated within the plot, both in present-day attractions and through ancient fertility rites that honor the seasons from a perspective of female empowerment. The abundant conflict at times gets messily, graphically, and time-consumingly violent, an indulgence that threatens to lacerate the intricate, well-developed plot. Some stones left unturned at the very end neatly set up the intrigue for the third book. Central characters are cued white.