Unhallowed Halls

Teenage Page Whittaker thinks “it feels too romantic to be real” after she accepts a scholarship to attend prestigious Agathion College, a boarding school for “gifted” kids located on the Scottish moors, in this expertly crafted dark academia fantasy novel by Wilkinson (Deep Is the Fen). Obsessed with gothic literature, Page finds Agathion—with its tall spires, gargoyle statues, and student body fluent in Latin and Greek—to be an academic’s dream, especially after the nightmare that was her former school, where she was involved in a deadly incident. But the timing of her scholarship is suspicious, and Page starts to wonder if she—and all the other students with their troubled pasts—was brought here for a reason. Covert clubs, dangerous tests of wits, and a mystery shrouded in dark magic and strange and ancient secrets unfurl in this stunning foray whose skillful plotting is reminiscent of Donna Tart’s The Secret History. Painterly descriptions of a rainy gothic atmosphere punctuated by suspense, horror, and humor as experienced by a dynamic and intersectionally diverse found-family cast feel at once as classic as its inspirations, and as an invigorating reinvention of the genre. Ages 14–up. Agent: Katelyn Detweiler, Jill Grinberg Literary. (Feb.)