Title: As I Descended Author: Robin Talley
Published: September 6, 2016
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 370
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Maria Lyon and Lily Boiten are their school’s ultimate power couple—even if no one knows it but them.
Only one thing stands between them and their perfect future: campus superstar Delilah Dufrey.
Golden child Delilah is a legend at the exclusive Acheron Academy, and the presumptive winner of the distinguished Cawdor Kingsley Prize. She runs the school, and if she chose, she could blow up Maria and Lily’s whole world with a pointed look, or a carefully placed word.
But what Delilah doesn’t know is that Lily and Maria are willing to do anything—absolutely anything—to make their dreams come true. And the first step is unseating Delilah for the Kingsley Prize. The full scholarship, awarded to Maria, will lock in her attendance at Stanford―and four more years in a shared dorm room with Lily.
Maria and Lily will stop at nothing to ensure their victory—including harnessing the dark power long rumored to be present on the former plantation that houses their school.
But when feuds turn to fatalities, and madness begins to blur the distinction between what’s real and what is imagined, the girls must decide where they draw the line.
Ah, yes. A lesbian YA retelling of Macbeth. It sounded so promising, so great, so dark and edgy and nefarious.
In short: too good to be true.
As I Descended pays only the scantest homage to Shakespeare’s drama, and in its writing, storytelling, and characterization, never scratches below the surface. It’s a bad book dressed up in a Shakespearean costume. But, nevertheless, it’s still a bad book.
What I find very typical with retellings (of literature, fairytales, etc.) is that these books seem to go through the motions of the original plot, but are so shallow and mechanical that they neither add to the original piece nor stand well on their own merit. As I Descended has a very niche audience: those who are familiar with at least the basic concept of Macbeth—I’m not sure anyone else would get much from it, to be honest. And even as someone who’s read Macbeth, I wasn’t particularly impressed.
Really troubling about this is that the very diverse characters were all…badly done. The main cast of four characters includes a disabled lesbian, two LGBT Latinxs, and a fat gay boy. Yay! But all of them were badly done? There was a lot of racial stereotyping, and the fat representation felt hopelessly morbid, of the “woe is me, I’m overweight and can never be happy, etc, look at how fat I am!” variety, when nobody else’s weight is even mentioned on the page.
Also, the presenting bisexual characters—there were two—were basically just lesbians in denial or experimenting straight girls. Because apparently that’s not a valid identity? IDK fam.
Anyway. I get that the original play is about a lot of awful people who do awful, conniving things. But without depth or nuance, As I Descended just turned into a very hairy look at teens acting like your typical psychopathic rich kids who can’t stand not getting their way. It was a good attempt at a YA Shakespeare, but did not pass muster at all. Think The Secret History, but terribly executed.
