Miss Mabel's School for Girls by Katie Cross

I devoured Miss Mabel’s School for Girls and desperately want more. While she thinks quickly and is able to get some help from her friends, there are times where Bianca seems to be completely on her own. Instead of merely being a natural, Bianca has trained and struggled from birth to prepare for her fights with Miss Mabel, and even then she is not always prepared. She fights because she absolutely has to, but for so much of the book she is forcing herself to get through each challenge. What I loved about Miss Mabel’s School for Girls is that Bianca is not the perfect teen witch born to challenge a great oppressor. The book has a distinct style that seems to flow from a rich heritage of Southern Horror. She has the familiar mean girls to contend with, as well as teachers that may or may not have her best interest at heart. Bianca has two friends she forms early on, but even finds herself not trusting them as she goes along. Her rich characters are more akin to the likes of high school and seem strangely familiar. While Harry Potter spent the first book showing the wonders of life in a magical world, Katie Cross intentionally shows the wickedness and dangers of a world where magic and civil unrest are commonplace. Miss Mabel’s School for Girls starts off slowly simmering, but quickly picks up speed and nuances. She must lay the groundwork to help save her family and herself in the process. Bianca causes a great stir when she volunteers as a first year. While all students are welcome to enter a competition to become Miss Mabel’s next trainee, third year students are usually the only ones brave enough to volunteer. Secretly trained her entire childhood, Bianca enters Miss Mabel’s School for Girls not to complete her training as a Network Witch, but to force Miss Mabel to break the curse on her family. In Bianca’s particular generation, she will die on her 17th birthday if the curse is not undone. During a coup, her grandmother was cursed and the ill health passes on for three generations. Bianca Monroe has lived under an ancestral curse since her birth. But oh, is Miss Mabel’s School for Girls so much darker. Miss Mabel’s School for Girls, the first in The Network Series by Katie Cross, feels like a book that would have happened if Hermoine Grainger from Harry Potter had been painfully cursed as a child and lived her whole life in a witch community.

Miss Mabel's School for Girls by Katie Cross