Review; The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette's by Hanna Alkaf

A few months ago, I read the dark academia/horror novel The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette's by Hanna Alkaf and today I'll post my review of the book.

Description from Goodreads

An all-girls private school is struck with mysterious cases of screaming hysteria in this chilling dark academia thriller haunted by a deeply buried history clawing to the light.

For over a hundred years, girls have fought to attend St. Bernadette’s, with its reputation for shaping only the best and brightest young women.

Unfortunately, there is also the screaming.

When a student begins to scream in the middle of class, a chain reaction starts that impacts the entire school. By the end of the day, seventeen girls are affected—along with St. Bernadette’s stellar reputation.

Khadijah’s got her own scars to tend to, and watching her friends succumb to hysteria only rips apart wounds she’d rather keep closed. But when her sister falls to the screams, Khad knows she’s the only one who can save her.

Rachel has always been far too occupied trying to reconcile her overbearing mother’s expectations with her own secret ambitions to pay attention to school antics. But just as Rachel finds her voice, it turns into screams.

Together, the two girls find themselves digging deeper into the school’s dark history, hunting for the truth. Little do they know that a specter lurks in the darkness, watching, waiting, and hungry for its next victim…

My Thoughts on the Book

While some may see The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette's as a ghost story, which it technically also is, there's a lot more to the book than just the ghost(s) of the paranormal kind. It's also about human horror - a critique of cultures that protects sexual abusers, commodification of women's bodies, and the dismissal of (young) women's voices. The book also explores sisterhood, bodily autonomy, and trauma, and it's very well-written in my opinion, without being an "in your face"-kind of thing.

Hanna Alkaf writes the characters with emotional depth, but I think the ending may have been slightly abrupt, although it can be viewed as an open ending too.

Overall I thought it was a good read though and I can easily recommend people to pick up The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette's without difficulty, especially as it's not that often one come across horror/paranormal fiction set in Malaysia.