Review: 'Bad Habits' by Amy Gentry

 As some of you may know I have recently returned to grad school and am doing a 2-year Research MA. I did a 1-year taught MA previously and that was one year of classes, readings, stress, tears, rewarding lessons and exhaustion. My current MA is a bit calmer, but the grad-environment remains one of tension and desire. So of course a thriller set at a prestigious and cutthroat grad program would be perfect to me. Thank you to Mariner Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 2/2/2021
Publisher: Mariner Books; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Claire "Mac" Woods—a professor enjoying her newfound hotshot status at an academic conference—finally has the acceptance and admiration she has long craved. But at the conference's hotel bar, Mac is surprised to run into a face from a past she'd rather forget: the moneyed, effortlessly perfect Gwendolyn Whitney, Mac's foil, rival, and former best friend.

When Gwen moved to town in high school, Claire—then known as Mac, a poor kid from a troubled family who had too much on her plate—saw what it meant to have. Money, sophistication, culture, the very blueprints to success. Mac had almost nothing, except the will to change. Change she did, habitually grinding herself to work as hard as straight-A Gwen, even eventually getting admitted into the same elite graduate program as Gwen. But then Mac and Gwen become entangled with the department’s power-couple professors and compete head-to-head for a life changing fellowship. The more twisted the track toward success becomes, the more Mac has to contort herself to stay one step ahead—which deception signals the point of no return?

Jack-knifing between Mac's world-expanding graduate days and the crucible of the hotel and its unexpected guests, Bad Habits follows Mac's reckoning between her hardscrabble past and tenuous present. What, exactly, did Mac do to get what she has today? And what will she do to keep it? With taut, powerful prose, Amy Gentry asks how far we'll go to get what we want--and whether we can ever truly leave the past behind.

Aaah grad school, the moment where you're both full of dreams and ideals and also still crushingly insecure about your own skills and abilities. Suddenly your professors could also be future colleagues and friends. Suddenly doing your best might actually not be enough, even if it has always served you before. Fellow students really do drop like flies in some grad programs. Of course not all grad programs are like this, but in those that are you either thrive or drown, as just swimming along doesn't cut it. This makes it, alongside elite universities in general, the perfect setting for a coming-of-age thriller, for the genre now called 'Dark Academia'. These environments can and will change you and the books seem to argue they hardly do so for the better. In these novels people become harder, smarter and sharper. They are quick-witted and dazzling, but also terrifying. It's fascinating to read about and no matter how bad it gets, the glamour of these institutions somehow always remains, beckoning the next generation of dreamy-eyed idealists.

Claire is almost there, almost has tenure, almost feels satisfied and safe. But then a ghost from her past appears, Gwen, the girl who never had to feel the sting of 'almost', who always was and had whatever she wanted. As we follow Claire and Gwen on the evening of their accidental reunion, we flash back to a time when Claire was still Mac and Gwen changed her life. Once a contestant in beauty pageants, teenage Mac has too much on her plate trying to keep her family afloat. Gwen is a breath of fresh air and as their friendship takes off Mac starts to want more. Once they both enter the Program, however, it becomes more difficult for Mac to know who to trust and how to stay on top. Bad Habits slowly moves us towards the moment where everything breaks, allowing past and present to intermingle until there are no more easy answers, until everything becomes a danger. Mac is an interesting main character, moving from surprisingly naive and trusting to ruthless and suspicious of everything. And you're not surprised she does. Pretty much everyone in Bad Habits is hiding something, secrets are everywhere and the only way to survive is to strike first. Bad Habits takes this train all the way past the final stop, with countless twists and turns, some of which genuinely took me by surprise. 

This is my first book by Amy Gentry but I had heard a lot about her. Although I needed a little bit of time to get into Bad Habits, once we made the first jump to the past I was completely on board. Giving us insights into both young Mac and determined, older Claire, Gentry slowly but surely builds up a fascinating main character who doesn't shy away from acknowledging humanity's darker instincts. Gentry not only crafts a twisty thriller, she also attempts to comment on some of the more insidious truths of the academic white tower. (Whether that qualifies it for the tag of 'Dark Academia' I'll leave up to other readers.) Don't get me wrong, I love the academic world, but it can be a very hard and exclusive environment to those that don't "typically" fit in, whether that is minorities or POC in general or women in STEM specifically. And of course there is the too frequently exploited power imbalance between professors and students. It is a tale as old as time, but no less terrifying in its ubiquity. Mac's naivety allows Gentry to explore all of these and this helps to ground the narrative that occasionally gets almost too outrageous. Towards the end of Bad Habits it occasionally felt like everything was happening at the same time and more than once I had to take a second to recap where we were at. But there was a thrill to this rush as well which had me turning the final page at 1:30am. I will most definitely be reading more of Gentry's books.

I give this novel...

3 Universes.

Bad Habits is was a thrilling ride. Although sometimes there is a little bit too much going on at once, Amy Gentry keeps you engaged and fascinated throughout. Universities continue to be a great setting for gripping thrillers and surprising twists.