Kate’s Review: “The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s”

This post may contain affiliate links for books we recommend.  Read the full disclosure here

Book: “The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s” by Hanna Alkaf

Publishing Info: Salaam Reads/ Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, September 2024

Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from the publisher.

Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound

Book Description: An all-girls school is struck with mysterious cases of screaming hysteria in this chilling dark academia thriller haunted by a deeply buried history clawing to the light.

For over a hundred years, girls have fought to attend St. Bernadette’s, with its reputation for shaping only the best and brightest young women. Unfortunately, there is also the screaming.

When a student begins to scream in the middle of class, a chain reaction starts that impacts the entire school. By the end of the day, seventeen girls are affected—along with St. Bernadette’s stellar reputation.

Khadijah’s got her own scars to tend to, and watching her friends succumb to hysteria only rips apart wounds she’d rather keep closed. But when her sister falls to the screams, Khad knows she’s the only one who can save her. Rachel has always been far too occupied trying to reconcile her overbearing mother’s expectations with her own secret ambitions to pay attention to school antics. But just as Rachel finds her voice, it turns into screams.

Together, the two girls find themselves digging deeper into the school’s dark history, hunting for the truth. Little do they know that a specter lurks in the darkness, watching, waiting, and hungry for its next victim…

Review: Thank you to Salaam Reads for sending me an eARC of this novel!

I went to an elite private school in St. Paul, Minnesota, and let me tell you the pressure was pretty horrendous (especially for a girl with a slew of learning disabilities and ADHD). But because of this experience that continues to kind of haunt me to this day in some ways, I’m always interested in a thriller/horror story that has an elite private school as its location. So when I was approached to read “The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s” by Hanna Alkaf I was pretty much on board right away. You already had me at private school woes of school girls screaming their heads off, but then you really sold me when 1) it was in a locale and culture that I’m not super familiar with, as this book takes place in Malaysia, and 2) there was a hinted at supernatural side to it. So I took the plunge with high hopes, and I’m happy to say that they were pretty well met!

In terms of a mystery thriller with a potential supernatural twist, “The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadettes” checks a lot of boxes that make it a successful read. We have our two protagonists Khadijah and Rachel, who have alternating chapters and can give us multiple insights across the story as the mystery unfolds (aka, why are their classmates at their prestigious all girls school suddenly screaming for no discernible reason, and what isn’t the school telling the students?). I liked following both of them as they had very different paths in terms of getting the clues together, and as there were more and more questions about whether it is hysteria, something otherworldly, or perhaps something totally understandable, I found myself more and more eager to get to the solution. Some of the imagery in this book was also downright frightening, with Alkaf setting the scene and creating a vision in my minds eye of a girl screaming her head off that really got under my skin. This may be a bit more of a mystery thriller than a horror story, but let me tell you, the bits that were horror were superb.

And even beyond the well paced and creepy mystery and horror story at hand, I really liked the other themes of this book, specifically the calling out and dressing down of violent misogyny and the silencing of women to keep a system untouched and in place. Both Khadijah and Rachel have different ways that they are being silenced, and I liked the choice that Alkaf made to show that there are different ways for these girls to be silenced, whether it is Khadijah’s selective and self imposed non speaking due to the trauma that she endured at the hands of her stepfather, or Rachel not feeling like she can have a say in any part of her future due to her overbearing and cold mother. We shift between both of their perspectives, and it was effective to see their different experiences and the different ways that they fit into the overall mystery of why their classmates are screaming, and how their experiences are both the results of societal expectations for women in their community, with Khadijah being basically silenced in the wake of her stepfather’s crimes and her victimization, and Rachel being pushed into a very specific acceptable box. Throw in the fact that the school is trying to hide a dark history with screaming girls and bouts of hysteria, and doesn’t want Khadijah making waves as she investigates, and you have a critique of misogyny that sears and burns in the best ways.

“The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s” is a well done thriller/mystery/horror tale. Hanna Alkaf is someone to watch. I know I will be doing so.

Rating 8: A tense and angry horror story that calls out violent and systemic misogyny and lauds feminine rage, “The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s” is a searing YA tale of all too real terrors to go with the fantastical ones.

Reader’s Advisory:

“The Hysterical Girls of St. Bernadette’s” is included on the Goodreads lists “Books by Malaysian Authors/Set in Malaysia”, and “Horror to Look Forward to in 2024”.