Nightingale by Amy Lukavics

Nightingale by Amy Lukavics

3.5 stars

June Hardie is your typical seventeen-year-old girl living in 1951. She has a boyfriend, comes from a good wholesome family, goes to school, and is learning how to cook. Except nothing is as it seems and the truth is her boyfriend is just another ploy for her father to have a booming business, her family is stilted and she hates her mother as much as her mother seems to hate her, all she wants is to go to college, and cooking doesn’t please her. Writing is her passion. June loves to write about the aliens that are torturing and rearranging her heroine. June Hardie can’t stop writing her story. Everything went wrong one morning and she woke up to find her parents replaced. Her parents are her parents now she is trapped in the Institution alongside girls who all have seemed to have encounters as strange as June. The Institution doesn’t want to help June and the girls have no hope of getting out the easy way. Getting better doesn’t seem to be an option. That synopsis that I wrote is a lot and it’s not even half of this story. This story is wild and there is far too much going on. It can be a bit overwhelming at times, but that’s what I like about Lukavics she packs a lot of social commentaries into a horror setting (usually not present day). I’ve always been fascinated by the 1950s housewife. I’m a huge fan of Revolutionary Road and I’ve written countless essays on the topic for literature classes, so this was right up my alley. It is all very Virginia Wolff combined with Sylvia Plath thrown into an outrageous horror setting. Lukavics’ writing is palpable and addicting. She is a well-crafted horror writer who knows how to intrigue and shock the reader. I wasn’t able to put this book down and felt like I just had to know what was going to happen next. The problem, however, was that I wasn’t a fan of the ending or the conclusion. It was lackluster, but I’ll speak more about that towards the end of my review.



“June thought of the story she wrote, thought about the aliens, always taking people away and changing them and trying to put them back as if nothing had happened. But nobody was ever quite right after coming back.”

Whimsical Writing Scale: 3.75

The main female character is June. I’ve noticed a pattern with Lukavics’ main heroines. I can’t stand them. They are usually very contrived women who are appealing to my inner feminist in the sense of me being like, “YAS, girl! Down with the patriarchy and the stifling confines of society, but also can you stop creeping me out?” The last heroine I encounter from her in Daughters Unto Devils was demon-possessed and wanted to murder her siblings. This girl wants to murder everyone and some point “satisfyingly” taints her family’s homecooked meal with her blood. It was weird, y’all. She has a lot of weird imaginings where she sees herself in the most horrifying and gruesome visions and she enjoys them. It’s a little too weird for my liking and she just feels skeevy. I felt like I was encountering a psychopath (and I kind of was, but no spoilers because it’s not that simple). She wasn’t a horrible character, but I wasn’t rooting for her. I just wanted to know what the heck was going on and why she was in this weird situation in the first place.


“She loved stories like that, the ones that made you realize how very created our ideas of safety and basic rights were.”

Kick-Butt Heroine Scale: 3

There is some girl group power in the Institution, but I didn’t really buy any of their friendships as a group dynamic. Everyone kind of seemed to be doing their own thing and was out for themselves. Eleanor is June’s roommate and she is one of the major characters in the Institution and is eventually June’s lover. I honestly wasn’t buying the romance because it all of a sudden happened, but it was different to see a lesbian romance in a horror story outside of American Horror Story. I just wasn’t buying it and also, that ending. How cliché. June’s family was a lot to take in. I didn’t like them and I’m not supposed to, but I kind of wished that their dynamic wasn’t so tainted. Also, the plot with her brother, Fred, escalated. I was supposed to believe he was this evil man, but really he was just a stand in for defeating the patriarchy in familial situations, which I’m not against, but I would have preferred more character development to get me to hate him.


“This wasn’t supposed to be a nightmare house, it was supposed to be a place built to make people feel better.”

Character Scale: 3.5

The Villain- Joya… Nurse Joya. She is like Sister Mary Eunice minus the nun costume and she’s less demonic and more Lovecraftian. This was all very Lovecraftian and I wasn’t against it because intergalactic feuds are interesting, but also, I know nothing about anything. I have more questions than answers.



“She savored her gift from the land of stars and voids.”

Villain Scale: 3.5

So, this horror novel is incredibly feminist and I loved that. It has a lot of wonderful commentary on the 1950s, suburbia, women writers, mental health treatment, hysteria, lobotomies, and family confines and expectations. I love all these things and it was a treat to read, but I have to talk about that ending and how I can’t really wrap my head around it, so here’s a quote that references Virginia Wolff and I’ll leave you with that before I give spoilers.


“Maybe having to exist in a single room forever wouldn’t be too awful of a thing.”
 
All along June’s story was about herself and her own alien abduction at ten-years-old. Which makes sense to me because I suspected that must be the case because she knew too well how she wanted her character to be tortured and she just kind of was able to get it all down at unearthly speed. I don’t know anything about the aliens who abducted her or why. Then the whole thing about Joya and the other nurses being one entity and race that eats people to survive – they are basically earth bottom feeders and the aliens want to destroy them. It’s all very all over the place. The showdown was kind of cool and different from what I expected. But the ending, June has all these powers from her abductions (mind control, manipulation, healing, etc.) and she manipulates her fiancée into being her slave forever and then murdered her brother because he ruined her chance to go write and he had to go because reasons? It was just weird. I was unfulfilled and just felt kind of knocked off my rocker a bit by where the story decided to go. I just don't know exactly how I feel. Do I like this or hate it? No, but I am confused on processing my thoughts.

Overall, I really enjoyed Nightingale and it has a lot of interesting facets that make it stand out from the horror YA genre. It’s not my favorite by Lukavics, but I do think it’ll find its fans. Especially those who love aliens and feminism and maybe Lovecraftian weirdness. This is one I definitely recommend!


Plotastic Scale: 3.25

Cover Thoughts: I live for this cover. The colors. The creepiness

Thank you, Netgalley and Harlequin Teen, for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Are you planning to read Nightingale? What are some of your favorite YA horror novels? Let me know down below in the comments!