Oligarchy
A Novel
-
-
4.7 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Seed Collectors comes a darkly comic take on power, privilege, and the pressure put on young women to fit in—and be thin—at their all–girls boarding school
It's already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of boarding school. She soon discovers that the headmaster gives special treatment to the skinniest girls, and Tash finds herself thrown into the school's unfamiliar, moneyed world of fierce pecking orders, eating disorders, and Instagram angst.
The halls echo with the story of Princess Augusta, the White Lady whose portraits—featuring a hypnotizing black diamond—hang everywhere and whose ghost is said to haunt the dorms. It's said that she fell in love with a commoner and drowned herself in the lake. But the girls don't really know anything about the woman she was, much less anything about one another. When Tash's friend Bianca mysteriously vanishes, the routines of the school seem darker and more alien than ever before. Tash must try to stay alive—and sane—while she uncovers what's really going on.
Darkly hilarious, Oligarchy is Heathers for the digital age, a Prep populated with the teenage children of the European elite, exploring youth, power, and affluence. Scarlett Thomas captures the lives of these privileged young women, in all their triviality and magnitude, seeking acceptance and control in a manipulative world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas's satisfying, keenly observed latest (after The Seed Collectors) takes place at an unnamed all-girls boarding school in the English countryside, where the girls, all from well-off families, spend their one hour of Wi-Fi every day catching on Instagram and Snapchat. Natasha Tash to the rest of the girls has just arrived from Russia, where she'd lived a humble life with her mother until her previously absent father brought her to England and into a new stratosphere of wealth, complete with a glamorous aunt in London and an American Express Black Card. Though Tash is welcomed at the school, she also must learn the language of starvation and thigh gaps, where the girls take turns inventing increasingly severe diets for the rest to follow: no butter, no tomatoes, cake only, etc. Thomas's depiction of the image-driven hive mind that dictates adolescent girls' relationships is spot-on, and the girls get thinner and thinner, especially as they receive the tacit approval of the creepy headmaster Dr. Moone, who seems to favor the skinniest girls. When one of their group dies under mysterious circumstances, Tash realizes the precariousness and danger of this new, moneyed world of which she's now part. Though Thomas's characters get a lot of flak for being insufferable rich girls from outsiders in the novel and they are she's captured with an empathetic eye all the brutal, visceral, and surprisingly funny aspects of teenage girlhood. This is a sharp, astute novel.
