The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place

Starred review from July 14, 2014
Readers with a penchant for dark humor will relish Berry’s (All the Truth That’s in Me) tongue-in-cheek murder mystery set in a late-19th-century British girls’ boarding school. The St. Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies, run by stern headmistress Constance Plackett, may not be paradise for its residents, but the students get an unanticipated break from their dull routines when Plackett and her odious brother drop dead at the dinner
table one spring evening, apparently poisoned. Knowing opportunity when they see it, the girls hatch a scheme to dispose of the bodies and run the school on their own. Unfortunately, a killer is on the loose, and the girls could be the next victims. The pupils’ attempts to convince the public that everything is normal at the school make for some hilarious scenes, and their efforts to find the murderer result in surprising encounters with suspicious (but often quite appealing)
suspects. Romance blooms in unexpected places, and danger lurks around every corner in this delightfully farcical tale, full
of twists and turns. Ages 10–14. Agent:
Alyssa Eisner Henkin, Trident Media Group.

July 15, 2014
When an overbearing headmistress and her odious brother drop dead, seven Victorian schoolgirls decide to run their school without adult interference.It's an ordinary Sunday dinner at Saint Ethelreda's School for Young Ladies until Mrs. Plackett and Mr. Aldous Godding choke on their veal and fall over, dead as a pair of unpleasant doornails. All of the seven students at Saint Ethelreda's, from Dull Martha to Dour Elinor, are horrified at the notion of their inevitable separation. Once they tell the authorities about Mrs. Plackett's death, surely they will all be sent back home to their dreadful families and shunted off to far worse schools. All seems lost until Smooth Kitty asks the others, what if they just don't tell the authorities about their headmistress's untimely demise? What follows is classic farce, as the young ladies spend the rest of that evening desperately hiding the corpses and their headmistress's absence from an unprecedented stream of callers. Stout Alice is disguised as Mrs. Plackett, Disgraceful Mary Jane initiates the garden gravedigging, and Pocked Louise helpfully adopts a puppy. A third of the way through the novel, the breakneck shenanigans abruptly settle, becoming merely the backdrop of a fairly classic drawing-room mystery. The young ladies are charming and their problem-solving ingenious, though the epithets used to describe them-it is never "Roberta," always "Dear Roberta"-get old very quickly.Droll farce yields to intriguing mystery, leaving the seams between them showing. (Farce/mystery. 11-13)

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October 1, 2014

Gr 6 Up-In this Victorian boarding school murder mystery, seven young women find themselves gloriously free from adult supervision when their judgmental, penny-pinching headmistress and her good-for-nothing brother die suddenly during dinner. Rather than alert the authorities and risk having the school shut down and all the students sent home, the girls decide to keep things under wraps and proceed as if the late headmistress and her brother were still alive. But first they'll have to bury the bodies in the garden without attracting the notice of busybody neighbors, potential suitors, a suspicious housekeeper, and a host of charmingly annoying villagers with a penchant for showing up at the worst possible moment. While juggling mounting debts and increasingly precarious fabrications in order to keep up their charade, the students also try to discover who poisoned the deceased-and why. Berry's prose is reminiscent of the dark comedy and melodrama of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" mysteries. Each girl at Saint Etheldreda's School is defined largely by an adjective that precedes her name: Dear Roberta, Disgraceful Mary Jane, Dull Martha, Stout Alice, Smooth Kitty, Pocked Louise, and Dour Elinor. The nicknames are illustrative of the insidious ways in which women and girls were pigeonholed and denigrated in the patriarchal society of 19th-century Great Britain, and over the course of the story, the characters prove that their supposed weaknesses are often the sources of great strength and ingenuity. That said, the device is used throughout the entirety of the book and will wear thin with some readers. The pacing slows midway, though kids will want to read on-if only to find out if the sisterhood winds up behind bars for all of their shenanigans. Overall, this is a well-researched, clever, and deliciously dark comedy with an emphasis on female empowerment.-Kiera Parrott, School Library Journal

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2014
This airy confection could not be more different from Berry's most recent (and pitch-black) novel All the Truth That's in Me (rev. 11/13). Part murder mystery, part girls'-school story, part dark drawing-room comedy (think Edwin Drood, Arsenic and Old Lace, or the 1980s movie Clue), the novel opens in 1890 England at Saint Etheldreda's School for Young Ladies. The seven students--our heroines--are known throughout the book as Dear Roberta, Disgraceful Mary Jane, Dull Martha, Stout Alice, Smooth Kitty, Pocked Louise, and Dour Elinor. Their headmistress is Mrs. Plackett, but she's dispatched in the second paragraph (by poison), followed soon afterward by her ne'er-do-well brother, Aldous. The young ladies spend the rest of the book trying to figure out whodunit while also concealing the deaths (burying the bodies in the vegetable garden; having Stout Alice impersonate Mrs. Plackett; bilking their parents for tuition) in order to remain together at the school. Berry takes her madcap seriously, never breaking character when it comes to the old-timey setting or details (a Strawberry Social is the unlikely occasion of a late-in-the-story death). The young ladies, too, are products of their time: each one's burgeoning independence and coming-into-her-own--largely gained through the murder investigation and/or cover-up, some also through snagging a beau--is satisfying without being too anachronistic. An immensely entertaining, smart, and frothy diversion. elissa gershowitz

(Copyright 2014 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

January 1, 2015
This airy confection is part murder mystery, part girls'-school story, part dark drawing-room comedy. In 1890 England, seven students--our heroines--attempt to solve the murder of their headmistress and her ne'er-do-well brother while concealing the deaths to remain together at the school. Berry takes her madcap seriously, never breaking character when it comes to the old-timey setting or details. An entertaining, smart, and frothy diversion.

(Copyright 2015 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)