Unlike Nancy, Felicity can no longer pretend to cling to the narrow status of perfection because her former friends and social circles have shunned her. She’s returned to Dalloway School, an elite boarding school in the Catskill Mountains, after taking some time off to grieve her girlfriend Alex’s tragic death. Nancy has an overwhelming desire to maintain her image, so even when we’re inside her thoughts, she still refuses to think about the actions she’s taken to get where she is-and the consequences of those actions.įelicity Morrow, the protagonist in Victoria Lee’s A Lesson in Vengeance, published on August 3, is a similarly unreliable narrator. Nancy, a somewhat unreliable narrator, wonders whether the Proctor knows about what she and her friends refer to as the Incident, which took place during their freshman year. When Jamie turns up dead, Nancy and her friends Krystal, Akil, and Alexander are publicly accused of murder by an anonymous source known as the Proctor and who seems to know all their secrets, especially the illegal and unethical things they have done to get and stay ahead. How We Fall Apart by Katie Zhao, published on August 17, focuses on how the environment of a high-achieving private school-Richard Sinclair Preparatory School-impacts a group of Asian American friends, namely protagonist Nancy Luo, who has always strived to top her frenemy Jamie Ruan’s academic achievements. That universal obsession with achievement makes dark academia popular, exacerbated by the pandemic and a feeling of uncertainty about when formal, in-person education will resume. Even those of us who are no longer young adults still sometimes feel the need to chase achievements, whether we act on it or not. This makes sense, given that around 58 percent of Gen Z-ers feel depressed or sad as a result of stress, and students attending high-achieving schools are at an increased risk of experiencing behavioral and mental health issues due to the pressure they’re under. Why is dark academia so widely appealing? Since they’re focused on school, most dark academia books are young adult or adult books set in high school or college. Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel, The Secret History, is often credited with starting dark academia as a literary subgenre, which aptly explores the dark side of academic study and the institutions and environments that push students beyond their limits. How We Fall Apart by Katie Zhao and A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee (Photo credit: Bloomsbury and Penguin Random House)ĭark academia is all over TikTok.
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