BOOK REVIEW: NIGHTINGALE BY AMY LUKAVICS

The undisputed Queen of YA horror, Amy Lukavics, invites you to join her in
a 1951 mental institution for troubled young women…..  Hell, YEAH, I’m in! 

There are numerous authors out there who frequently return to their most successful ideas or stick to their safe, tried and tested, formulae. Amy Lukavics is not an author of this type, far from it. With a back-catalogue of four widely varied novels, you would be hard pressed to find many writers with more diverse plotlines than Lukavics. The overriding feature her stories have in common is the simple fact that they all have troubled teenage young women as their central characters.  Remember this is YA, everyone has issues! Connected to that all four novels spin deliciously enticing webs of horror which should be compulsive reading for a teenage audience.
 
“Nightingale” is the intricately plotted fourth and latest offering, but before we get onto that, here’s a brief recap on Amy’s previous releases, all of which I have reviewed at Ginger Nuts and given the five-star treatment. “Daughters unto Devils” (2015) an introverted teenager with issues encounters the supernatural in frontier times America, “The Woman in the Walls” (2016) two teenage cousins believe they hear a familiar voice radiating from an upstairs bedroom and “The Ravenous” (2017) a brutal tale about the death of the youngest of five sisters and the lengths they will go to in bringing her back to life. Earlier in 2018 this novel made the final ballot of the YA Bram Stoker Award, but sadly was outvoted by a greatly inferior work. I should expect to see “Nightingale” on the same final ballot next year as it is head and shoulders above the majority of YA horror I have come across thus far this year.
 
In “Nightingale” we head back to 1951 to have our brains truly scrambled in a food-mixer. June Harding is an ordinary seventeen-year-old who dreams of being a successful writer of science fiction once she graduated from high school. Or perhaps June’s brain is more scrambled than ours? Anyway, June is obsessed with the story she is writing, which sounds like a take on ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and is never happier than when she is working on her typewriter. She is a woman possessed and passionate about writing.  A few months away from graduating, June secretly applies to do a writing course knowing full well this is against her family’s wishes. This is 1951, and her family expect her to settle down with the son of her father’s prospective business partner and eventually squeeze out a couple of kids.
 
Horror aside, Lukavics draws a realistic and vivid picture of how life was for many young women in the 1950s. Options were limited, marriage was expected, and few went to college. June Harding is a woman out of both place and time and humours her dominating mother, who just cannot understand why June is not able or interested in making a delectable meat loaf. It’s important to note the conflict June has with her family, which is one of the crucial themes of the book.
 
Where’s the horror you may be asking? The story is told in two sequences ‘The Institution’ and ‘Days Past’ which are intrinsically linked and before too long, with superb pacing, your tongue will be hanging out because each of the sections leads to questions about the other. I do not want to give too much away though.
 
Getting away from June’s family for a moment, the novel actually begins in Burrow Place Asylum (‘The Institution’) where we quickly realise her parents have had her committed against her will. The ‘Days Past’ section is the sequence set with her family, her writing and her potential escape to pursue her dream. However, in ‘The Institution’ sequences we learn something unspeakable happened, a major ‘event’ and this is why she is in this mental hospital. Much of the fun of the book is waiting, or trying to figure out, what happened. 
 
June is a great character, and she certainly has her problems, and one of the great strengths of “Nightingale” is deciding whether we believe her or not. In the opening five pages (from the Institution) it is revealed June believes her parents have been replaced by something else and before long the weird doctor and nurses start to dig a little deeper into why she thinks this.
 
The hospital sequences are superb as things get stranger and stranger, with a well-drawn set of damaged support characters, all of which have different issues from believing they were on the Titanic to thinking they are already dead.  Before long we have nightmares, hallucinations, experiments, questions about sexuality, lobotomies, much of which is different to separate from reality. 
 
It’s worth noting that men are usually in the background of Lukavics’ books and this is the case in “Nightingale” also with both the brother and boyfriend portrayed as fairly one dimensional and I wonder whether any male teen readers might pick up on this, or even be put off by it. I’ll be interested to see when Amy decides to give a guy a more fleshed out part in one of her future novels.
 
I really enjoyed “Nightingale” and it kept me buzzing right to the end. The two different sequences balanced each other out perfectly and I think it would have been easy to have a cop-out or ambiguous ‘you decide’ ending which is very trendy in horror fiction these days. Be rest assured “Nightingale” does not do that and has a freaky wild conclusion which I thought was really cool, however, I’m sure some readers might not like it. Lukavics has written four tremendous novels on the bounce and at the moment there are very few authors writing YA horror as intelligent as this. 
 
Tony Jones

---

At seventeen, June Hardie is everything a young woman in 1951 shouldn't be--independent, rebellious, a dreamer. June longs to travel, to attend college and to write the dark science fiction stories that consume her waking hours. But her parents only care about making June a better young woman. Her mother grooms her to be a perfect little homemaker while her father pushes her to marry his business partner's domineering son. When June resists, her whole world is shattered--suburbia isn't the only prison for different women...June's parents commit her to Burrow Place Asylum, aka the Institution. With its sickening conditions, terrifying staff and brutal "medical treatments," the Institution preys on June's darkest secrets and deepest fears. And she's not alone. The Institution terrorizes June's fragile roommate, Eleanor, and the other women locked away within its crumbling walls. Those who dare speak up disappear...or worse. Trapped between a gruesome reality and increasingly sinister hallucinations, June isn't sure where her nightmares end and real life begins. But she does know one thing: in order to survive, she must destroy the Institution before it finally claims them all.