The Ophelia Girls

July 1, 2021
In the 1990s, Ruth and her family move into the crumbling ancestral estate after the death of Ruth's estranged father. Life is not what Ruth had envisioned, for herself or her teenage daughter, Maeve, who barely survived cancer. Ruth's childhood friend and college roommate, Stuart, takes a break from war photography to stay in the gardener's cottage. These factors combine to create complicated marital and family dynamics. Meanwhile, Ruth flashes back to the languid 1973 summer she and her friends spent taking "Ophelia" pictures--pretending to be drowned in the nearby river--and that summer's devastating consequences. Readers may find one of the central relationships unsettling (to paraphrase Stuart, just because something is [barely] legal doesn't meant it's right). Healey's provocative second novel, following The Animals at Lockwood Manor (2020), is full of broken and deeply unhappy people, denial, and secrets that contribute to a tension-building past mystery. Those seeking stories of female coming-of-age and how experiences of sexuality and death can shape teenage girls into the women they later become will find much to explore in The Ophelia Girls.

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August 2, 2021
Healey (The Animals at Lockwood Manor) captivates with a dark and sensual novel that reveals the inner lives of two teenage girls a generation apart. Middle-aged Ruth Hawkins moves her family into the ramshackle country house in Kent, England, where she spent her childhood, after the death of her estranged father. Her 17-year-old daughter Maeve’s cancer is in remission, and she hopes the family can heal together. But returning to the house—and offering the guest house to Stuart, a friend from her youth and now a celebrated photographer—brings back memories of the summer of 1973, a time tinged by love and tragedy. Then, Ruth and her friends were called “the Ophelia Girls” by their parents for posing in maudlin Polaroid photos inspired by pre-Raphaelite paintings and tragic heroines. Now, Maeve, bearing a striking resemblance to the youthful Ruth, secretly agrees to pose for Stuart in a series of suggestive portraits. Imagery of drowning and of natural cycles of bloom and decay suffuses Maeve’s narrative and Ruth’s flashbacks—and can feel overdone—but Healey excels at probing her characters’ psyches. Ruth longs to be a good mother, while Maeve vacillates between not wanting to grow up and wanting Stuart to see her as mature. In the end, this develops into a lush, seductive portrait of desire. Agent: Hayley Steed, Madeleine Milburn Literary.