The Broken Girls by Simone St. James

I bought The Broken Girls, by Simone St. James, at The Poet’s Corner bookshop in Duncan’s Mills. It’s a ghost story mystery with a girl’s boarding school, and in the midst of the hurly-burly of holiday prep, it seemed like just the thing for a few hours of escape.

St. James splits the story between two timelines. In 2014, journalist Fiona Sheridan still wrestles with the aftermath of the murder of her sister Deb twenty years earlier. Tim Christopher, the man convicted of her murder, is behind bars, but Fiona still struggles with details that make no sense. The biggest one is where Deb’s body was found, laid out on the sports fields of the abandoned Idlewild Hall, formerly a girls’ boarding school.

The other timeline follows four girls at the school in 1950. They are roommates who becomes friends and allies in an institution set up to warehouse, not educate, throw-away women. Their coalition is broken when Sonia, a European war refugee, disappears after a short visit to some relatives. The school immediately dismisses Sonia as a “runaway,” but her three friends track the gossip closely and it’s clear Sonia vanished on her way back to the school.

And Idlewild Hall has a resident ghost, Mary Hand. Mary leaves words written on steamed up mirrors in the bathrooms, she whispers in students’ ears, she wanders the grounds in mourning black. Mary is a terrifying presence. Generations of Idlewild schoolgirls have tracked her appearances by writing notes in the margins of the textbooks. Since this so-called “school” hasn’t updated its texts since its formation in 1920, our four roommates have an archive at their fingertips. What does Mary want?

Fiona is an active protagonist, fitting for a 2014 heroine. She has a hot-but-troubled relationship with Jamie, a local cop, and struggles to break through to her father, who lives in his own world since Deb’s murder. The girls in 1950 are powerless yet I found their story more compelling. Of course it has the ghost and the “active” mystery, which bleeds through into the 2014 storyline.

Halfway through the book, a revelation about Sonia and one thing she did at the school suddenly shifted the stakes for me. I went from being interested in the book to being 100% invested in Sonia’s story. I needed the truth to come out.

The pacing is brisk enough, but St. James isn’t afraid to stop and dwell for moments on the centuries-long practice of erasing and silencing women. All four girls have been sent away from 1950s homes because in one way or another they were “inconvenient.” The lengths reached to erase Sonia, her mother, and others like her is not new, but newly horrifying here. In 2014, Fiona confronts the former police chief (Jamie’s father) who laments that Tim Christopher, the scion of the town’s richest family, had “his life ruined” when a jury found him guilt of Deb’s murder. He says that this destroyed the town. Somehow, Deb, whose life was ripped away from her, is at fault for getting murdered.

Very close to the end, Fiona must do something stupid in order for the plot to work. I sighed in exasperation and rolled my eyes but kept reading–not because of Fiona, but because of Sonia. This was more than a quibble–it was a big pothole, but don’t let it put you off the book. (For one thing, it’s close to the end.) The active ghosts, and the final few pages, took the edge off my exasperation. Overall, this is a good read and I’m very glad I picked it up.