INSATIABLE

Catriona Cameron desires nothing more than an education, but she knows never to speak a wish aloud—for the fairies, ever listening, might choose to grant it “in the worst way possible.”

It’s 1885 in the Scottish Highlands, and 17-year-old Catriona’s patronizing brother, Hamish, wishes that she might attend school just so she’d fail miserably. Catriona is therefore wary of the mysterious stranger who arrives on their doorstep immediately after this utterance, bearing an invitation to the elite and newly coed Floodbane Academy. But the alternative is back-breaking work in the fields before her father marries her off to the local butcher at 18, so she accepts. The boys of Floodbane are determined to make life hell for the six newly arrived girls, and she’s physically assaulted after her first day of classes by young men who also taunt her with reckless wishes. Now she’s blessed with preternatural beauty and strength and cursed with an insatiable hunger for the blood of men who wrong women. Will she be able to regain her humanity? Does she even want to? This queer gothic horror novel grapples with overarching questions of misogyny, the right to education, structural inequality, and the freedom to be responsible for one’s own future. The characterization lacks depth, but the narration is viscerally evocative, and the plot and romance are compelling. Catriona’s father is white and mother has deep brown skin.

An engaging examination of the best and worst of humanity.