Book Review: ‘The Four’ by Ellie Keel (dark academia thriller)
This is one of those debuts that I feel like publishing has been shouting about ever since the cover was revealed and I’ve been convinced since then that we had to read it for the podcast. Convinced. I got my way!
I had big feelings about how much I was going to love this, and then Sarah devoured the audiobook really fast saying she couldn’t stop listening, and then I read it and I still don’t know how I feel about it…
In case you’ve missed this book being splashed all over social media, here’s what it has to offer:
We were always The Four. From our very first day at High Realms.
The four scholarship pupils. Outsiders in a world of power and privilege.
It would have made our lives a lot easier if Marta had simply pushed Genevieve out of our bedroom window that day. Certainly, it would have been tragic. She would have died instantly.
But Marta didn’t push her then, or – if you choose to believe me – at any other time. If she had, all of what we went through would not have happened.
I’ve told this story as clearly as I could – as rationally as I’ve been able, in the circumstances, to achieve. I don’t regret what we did. And I would do it all again.
‘The Four’ is an incredibly intense novel with lots of triggers and bit topics that tackled head on so I would really recomend checking out the content warnings before getting stuck into this one. You can find them on Storygraph here. Even though I don’t have many true triggers myself, I found this really difficult to read at times.
The bullying is horrific, sexual abuse and rape comes up at multiple points for multiple characters, and the violence that these children inflict on each other completely unchecked by the school is incredibly uncomfortable to read. I expected intensity from this book but the level of horror in these pages actually ended up destroying my suspension of disbelief. As nasty and uninterested in the welfare of the students as some of the adults are in this book, there are equally approachable and responsible adults who completely and utterly failed in their duty of care and there is no way that it wouldn’t have been picked up by a parents, raised by another teacher, or even witnessed by someone as this is a boarding school.
While the disgusting level of bullying is a part of the structure of how High Realms is run, the level of it wasn’t necessary and it consistently pushed me out of the story. Maybe I was just too sensitive during the week that I listened to this audiobook (Ell Potter does a wonderful job with the audio, I recommend it!), but I couldn’t stomach it and I just couldn’t accept that it had been allowed to happen so frequently, for so long, and with no repercussions.
The pervading threat and terror of the bullies in ‘The Four’ did evoke a very tense atmosphere, especially with the tasks that Rose, Lloyd and Sammy have to undertake during the course of the story, and that never let up. Keel sustained that heavy claustrophobia throughout and it was almost a relief to get to the end. Her writing is so strong and her sense of place - something very important to me and us when we discuss novels on The Dark Academicals - so I really can’t fault her on that. When I was reading ‘The Four’ I was at High Realms with Rose and I felt like I knew that school as well as she did.
‘The Four’ is a dark, twisting and tense dark academia thriller that has already set Ellie Keel’s writing right up there and I’ve very intrigued to see what she writes next.
Written by Sophie
