Book Review | The Ophelia Girls

In the summer of ‘73, Ruth and her friends would venture down to the riverbanks to take photos of each other and reenact the ill-fated Ophelia’s drowning. However, as their tableaus became increasingly more elaborate, things went horribly wrong and their summer ended in tragedy.

24 years later, Ruth returns to her old family home with her sickly seventeen-year-old daughter Maeve. There Maeve meets her mother’s old photographer friend who asks her to start modeling for him in secret, and their relationship takes a sordid turn.

Alternating between the mother and daughter’s perspective, the past and present collide as Ruth’s memories begin to resurface.

Lyrical and evocative, The Ophelia Girls by Jane Healey is an atmospheric read that transports you to a lazy summer day. This book is wonderful and breathtakingly gorgeous at the sentence level. However, it’s in the execution of its themes where the story drops the ball.

Perhaps because Shakespeare and Romanticism are my areas of study, I came into this book with high expectations, so I was ultimately disappointed that this book didn’t delve deeper into Ophelia’s character and draw further parallels between Ophelia’s grief and the characters’ own beyond a superficial level.

Lastly, the explanation for what happened in the summer of ’73—one of the biggest underlying mysteries of the story—felt quickly shoehorned in and treated as an anticlimactic afterthought.

All in all, The Ophelia Girls is a melancholic coming-of-age story about our obsession with youth. It was filled with so much promise and potential, which only makes its half-baked ideas all the more frustrating.

Thank you, NetGalley and Mariner Books, for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Book Details:

Publication Date : August 10, 2021

Publisher : Mariner Books

ISBN : 0358106419

Pages : 373

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