“Lennon Carter’s life is falling apart. Then she gets a mysterious phone call inviting her to take the entrance exam for Drayton College, a school of magic hidden in a secret pocket of Savannah. Lennon has been chosen because—like everyone else at the school—she has the innate gift of persuasion, the ability to wield her will like a weapon, using it to control others and, in rare cases, matter itself.”

An Academy for Liars, Alexis Henderson

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Spoilers Ahead!

Please enjoy a spoiler-filled recap of the book, with my many, many, questions interspersed:

• Lennon is 24 and already a stay-at-home-fiancée. And then she’s shocked when her fiancé cheats on her? With a coworker?! Like babe, if you’re gonna roleplay a 1950s marriage, you’re gonna get a 1950s marriage!
• After walking in on the cheating, her first move is to just leave and drive in a straight line?? There’s no friend to call, no older sister you want to chat with? Instead, you just answer the ringing pay phone and follow the instructions you’re given?
• Following those instructions leads her to a random house in Utah (red flags galore!) and she goes inside and does whatever the stranger tells her to do??
• Lennon acknowledges she’s had mental breakdowns before, but can’t fathom that this might be a mental break? (My real hypothesis is that none of this story is true and it’s all Lennon’s delusion.)
• The man explains that this magic school, Drayton, is ready for Lennon to apply. Lennon says “I never applied,” and he says “everyone applies at birth and we keep track of them.”
• How is any college (magic or not) keeping track of the magical abilities of every single person on the planet? Is this a Santa-Claus-type operation? 
• Then Lennon gets on a magic elevator and is brought to a magic, hidden campus to take the real entrance exams. The first is a test where you label emotions on pictures. The second is where she does the Jedi mind-trick and makes a professor pick up a small tchotchke from his desk. And she thinks the professor (Dante) is hot.
• I can accept the college entrance exam shenanigans. But how do they have enough professors to individually test each student’s magical abilities at the same time? In the book, we meet a total of like 4 professors. Where are the other 20 or 30? Are they the Santa elves, tracking down every single human being? 
• Lennon passes all the exams and finds herself in her new dorm room with her new roommate, Blaine. 
• Cannot imagine being 24 and stuck in a dorm with a roommate. I’d revolt.
• The students learn that they’re just going to take magic classes all day, and they work on mind-controlling rats with hot professor Dante..
• Lennon goes to a party and does mushrooms. Then she accidentally summons one of the magical elevators, and subsequently has a seizure and passes out.
• When she wakes up, her classmates have told the professors, and she gets grilled about the elevator.
• She saw a little boy and a brown moth inside the elevator, but doesn’t tell anyone that. 
• Why wouldn’t you be completely honest about what you saw? PERHAPS BECAUSE YOU THINK THE PLACE IS SKETCHY? BUT THEN YOU INSIST ON STAYING???
• Lennon starts getting special classes after the elevator deal. First it’s with her original college interviewer, Benedict. Then things get intense and hot professor Dante insists on taking over. 
• Later in the book, we learn that when Dante came to Drayton, he studied under Benedict with another student named August. While August had similar skills to Lennon, he and Dante were both very talented.
• Dante has to go on a “business trip” and Lennon insists on going with him.
• They magical elevator to Amsterdam. He meets up with a Drayton alum, and they make some kind of deal.
• Then a absolutely fucked up demon monster appears. It uses mind control on the crowd, and Lennon freaks out. Dante starts fighting for control of the crowd, and makes Lennon go hide.
• Then Dante finds Lennon, gives her a gun, and tells her to put it in her mouth. And if he’s not the next one through the door, TO PULL THE TRIGGER.
• And listen, there’s some actual gore in this book, but what the actual fuck is that?
• They escape, but not before Dante has a full mental breakdown and starts sucking the energy out of all the humans in the vicinity. And Lennon’s doing the classic “Baby, this isn’t you. Look at me, pwease stop.” (Spoiler, this is just about where I gave up on thinking the plot might be headed somewhere worthwhile.)
• They make it to Benedict’s house and discover that he’s dead, sitting there with his wrists slit.
• Later in the book, we learn that Lennon is actually the one who killed Benedict. She time-travels to confront him, he tries to kill her because he believes she’s corrupt, so she kills him.
• And this begs the question, was Benedict right, and is Lennon morally evil?? It’s not a hard no!!
• Dante and Lennon get back to school and everyone’s suspicious. But it’s winter break, so they send her home. Dante avoided her the few days they had back at school, and then dropped her as her academic advisor. 
• Lennon goes home for the holidays and is very weird to her family. Her older sister clocks it and is immediately suspicious, so Lennon tries to mind wipe her, multiple times.
• I’m an older sister, so there’s some biases, but WHY THE FUCK ARE WE PUNISHING THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN HELP YOU??
• Lennon also calls the school and says if Dante isn’t her instructor, she isn’t coming back.
• Not a therapist, but blackmailing a man into forced proximity is so toxic and disgusting??
• So on Christmas Day, Dante shows up and hauls her ass back to school.
• Then she gets special classes with Dante, and it’s just the two of them. They’ve spent this whole time trying to get her to able to summon magical elevators (portals, if you will), and she was only successful when they were running away from Mr. Demon Man.
• There’s some secret society hazing stuff, and Lennon becomes well-known on campus as the girl with crazy powers who’s fucking her professor. Except Dante won’t fuck her, so she’s real bitter about it.
• Then she gets into a power duel with a classmate who is determined to kill her. She summons a magic elevator and uses it to literally sever the kid in half. And then she gets kicked out of school.
• Notably, the secret society stuff also includes injuring and potentially killing a fellow classmate. That activity is what sparked this fight, but that’s going too far?
• And you might think, “Phew, now she’ll go live with her normal, adult, lawyer sister and just give all of this up!” NO!
• She goes and lives with Dante, at his house!!!!! For months!! Her professor’s house!!! He’s like 40 and she’s 24!!
• In the beginning, it’s very “open your mind, calm your soul, summon an elevator.” And it quickly turns into “We fuck day and night.” 
• A list of things Lennon learns about Dante during the summer of fucking:
  • He was imprisoned as a child for potentially killing people (those gosh darn powers!!)
  • He was mute as a child
  • He beat up his step-father when he was 9 and almost decapitated him (those powers again!)
  • He persuaded his way out of the child jail at 11 and went to live with an aunt
  • When the aunt died, he was 15, and was immediately accepted into Drayton
  • His professor was Eileen, the current vice-chancellor of Drayton
  • Eileen seduced Dante and started raping him while he was still a child
  • This dynamic continued and at some point produced a child, who is now in his teens
  • Dante and Eileen were still having regular sex until Lennon got kicked out of school
  • When Dante was still a student, he worked with Benedict and another student, August
  • August had the same skills as Lennon, but started going crazy, so Benedict made Dante kill August
• A list of things Lennon did after learning this facts
  • Made Dante a birthday cake
  • I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP. I ALMOST WISH AI WAS MAKING THIS UP!!!
• Some of the professors arrive at Dante’s house and say “Time’s up, gang. Gotta go back to school. But first, go chat with Eileen!”
• So they do, and it’s a super normal interaction, and they even meet Eileen’s husband. VERY CASUAL TO MEET YOUR CURRENT ILLICIT HOOK-UPS RAPIST, SON, AND RAPIST’S HUSBAND.
• Then they go back to Drayton and learn about some new surprises.
• The campus of Drayton is guarded by magical gates that protect the campus from intruders. The gates were put in place by a student named William Irvine back in the 1800s. And the gates are failing.
• Why are the gates failing? Is it because there’s a new power imbalance with Lennon’s natural skills? Is it because the world is changing? Is it because someone shady has been sabotaging the campus’s infrastructure? Is it because not enough kids believe in Santa? No!
• It’s because WILLIAM IRVINE HAS BEEN KEPT ALIVE FOR LITERALLY A DECADE. HIS POWER HAS BEEN SIPHONED OFF OF OTHER PEOPLE TO SUSTAIN HIM AND THE GATES.
• Well, how does that happen? Not explained. Are they using child sacrifices? Who knows. Are people donating energy like you’d donate blood? Possible, there’s no explanation. How has his body not rotted away? Not a clue, babes!
• Another weird thing revealed is that Blaine, Lennon’s roommate, seems to have some connection to Irvine. She was always gone for a “job,” and then she’s sitting by Irvine, holding his hand. Very unclear on if she’s like his great-granddaughter, if she’s volunteering her life force, if she’s fucking his corpse, or if it’s just her on-campus job to monitor his vitals.
• This is where things get crazy, around about roughly 88%. (And I know you’re torn between asking “How could it get crazier?” and “When will it start making sense?” My answer is “No one knows.”)
• Lennon is captured by Dante (sir, WTF?) and Eileen and literally handcuffed away. They explain that they’re going to replace her with William Irvine’s body, and start sucking the life out of her to maintain the school’s security. It’s very Miracle Max and Only Mostly Dead from The Princess Bride. Then Lennon uses her mind control to convince the rats they use in class to come gnaw her out of her shackles, and they do??
• Then it’s very “we’re rebelling against this power structure” and all of Lennon’s friends rally to protect her. Lennon has literally 4 friends and like 2 rats, but they manage to get her to the edge of the property! 
• Then we find out that’s because Dante was using his Big Boy Powers to control everyone. But yay for Lennon doing nothing with all that raw, natural talent!!
• There’s a big final fight in front of William Irvine’s draining corpse, and Lennon is suddenly able to take control of literally the whole school.
• But also at the same time, Dante dies! Bummer!!
• And then we flash forward 6 months! Because there were no immediate follow-up questions anyone had!
• Lennon is Head Bitch In Charge and replaced all the tenured staff with her classmates, who have 1 ½ years of magical education! No issues there!
• And then she spends the next 6 months time-travelling to find Dante, because she’s convinced he’s not dead!
• Doesn’t she have more important things to do, like tell her family she’s alive? Or run the school she’s literally controlling? No ❤
• Does she find Dante? Yes!
• Does he want to come back to the real world? No, and then maybe yes.
• Ready for my biggest question of all time? WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE DEAL WITH THE GODDAMN MOTH?
  I get that it represented Dante, mostly because that was shoved down my throat. Every time Lennon used an elevator to the past, she’d see little Dante and a brown moth. Adult Dante is covered in tattoos of brown moths. When Eileen is threatening Dante, she sends him a pinned brown moth. There’s a goddamn brown moth on the cover. BUT WHY IS THERE A MOTH???

If you have made it to the end of my rant, I truly salute you. You have a stronger mental fortitude than Lennon.