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 o...