Satire of arts Academia meets Heathers. Perspective character is a poor-kid outsider to her glittering rich-girl classmates so you can likely decide for yourself if that mixture of sometimes justified, sometimes self-sabotaging resentment and self-pity is going to grind your gears or not. I enjoyed the hyperbolic descriptions of her classmates, I enjoyed the gory horror twist to their antics. The book is not unpredictable and I didn't find it particularly tense. I enjoyed it well enough.

I don't think this book makes particularly strong statements about Academia, femininity, or whatever else it is supposed to be about. It's more an atmosphere of satire than a satire with a point. I found myself thinking that was pretty fun and hilarious in the beginning quarter, then found myself getting quite bored for the last quarter of the book. For the middle quarters, some of the imagery and weirdness kept me going. I was not particularly invested in the main character, and sadly didn't find her interesting. So although I think she is "important" in many scenes, pages that focus on her alone are often really dull. There is little to like about Samantha and her friend, and they do not like her classmates. So fascination with the classmates is really the only thing I had to enjoy about anyone's actions in the book. Not everything has to have some tremendous point, but there are characters and tensions that feel really half-finished. So, at times it feels brilliantly funny, at other times it is uncomfortable not for its horrors but for weird banal entanglements. This book leaves a lot of things unanswered, but not in a way I think really adds any depth to it.

Speaking of unanswered, there is a lot of interpretation going around about Samantha's mental state and the reality or unreality of the events in the book. I caution against taking a firm stance on this. This is one of the things the book actually does well, though in a fairly simple way. The book is totally coherent at face value, if you assume the events are literal and real. The book is also totally coherent if you assume nearly nothing happening is real. The book doesn't itself bring up the question of unreality, but many readers have. I don't think this is masterful in the way many books specifically about delusion (The Double) are, but I enjoy that the story works either way and doesn't really insist on a twist (Fight Club). I do think assumptions of delusion flatten the book massively, even if a literal interpretation is ridiculous. I think the book is best enjoyed NOT trying to be clever about every little thing Awad writes, because frankly I don't think everything she wrote here was that clever.