The World Cannot Give

October 1, 2021

At St. Dunstan's Academy in Maine, wide-eyed newbie Laura Stearns becomes enthralled with queen-of-students Virginia Strauss, who virtually runs the school's chapel choir (while running miles each day before dawn) and draws Laura into her obsession with transcendent music, obscure ritual, risky cliff-diving, and the Christian faith. Then the new chaplain intervenes, and Laura must decide just how committed she is to the increasingly power-hungry Virginia. A queer coming-of-age story from Burton, who debuted with the multi-best-booked Social Creature; a 60,000-copy first printing.

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December 13, 2021
Burton underwhelms with a redux of her debut, Social Creature, in which an egotistical alpha girl seduces a naive disciple. Set at St. Dunstan’s Academy, a boarding school on the coast of Maine, the story revolves around Virginia Strauss, leader of the tradition-bound school choir, and Laura Stearns, a transfer who has fallen in love with the school after discovering a book written by alumnus Sebastian Webster, a Byronic figure who died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The calculating and zealous Virginia draws Laura into her inner circle, all young men who also adore Webster, goading them with ritualistic challenges that include blood oaths and dangerous cliff diving. But new chaplain Reverend Tipton doesn’t take kindly to Virginia’s cultish hold on the choir, and when Tipton adds a singer to their ranks, a popular and pretty girl who happens to be one of Virginia’s nemeses, Virginia’s behavior turns mortally dangerous. Laura, who adores Virginia unconditionally, must decide how far she is willing to follow her friend into a sinister morass. The plot advances too transparently in service of proving a familiar truism: young people on the cusp of adulthood, longing to find meaning, face ethical, sexual, and spiritual crises. It’s an inspired effort, but it doesn’t break any new ground.

February 15, 2022
Laura Stearns weeps on the way to St. Dunstan's Academy in Maine because she hopes to experience a shipwreck of the soul, as a long-ago Dunstan alum who died young wrote about in a novel that Laura worships. But Laura is way out of her depth in Burton's (Social Creature, 2018) second novel. Fellow student Virginia wields intense social power, particularly with the boys in the choir to which Laura is recruited as the only other girl. Laura's inability to say no to Virginia's increasingly questionable choices enmesh the girls in a fraught relationship with life-and-death stakes. The novel's title signals both its end and the fatal flaw in Laura's hopes. Burton writes with a heart-stopping understanding of the micro-dynamics among adolescents still uncentered at their cores. The insular campus setting and small scenes in crypts, libraries, and dorm rooms that contain big emotions and powerful dialogue will make readers cringe at what they can see coming. Burton traps Laura in a difficult, misguided world and forces her to run toward something else.

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Starred review from January 1, 2022
Teenage zealotry turns toxic. Earnest Nevada high school junior Laura Stearns is so obsessed with Sebastian Webster's 1936 work of "wild-eyed genius," All Before Them, that she convinces her parents to send her to St. Dunstan's, Webster's alma mater and the coastal Maine academy where his book is set. Like Webster's self-modeled protagonist, Laura yearns to escape the "sclerotic modern world" and undergo a "shipwreck of the soul"--experiences she feels certain her transfer will facilitate. Though Laura is initially disillusioned by the irreverence her peers have for St. Dunstan's and its traditions--particularly Evensong, a weekly church service at which attendance is mandatory--everything changes when fellow Webster devotee Virginia Strauss invites Laura to join the chapel choir, of which she is president. Laura and the five boys who comprise the group may not share Christian convert Virginia's fire-and-brimstone fervor, but they are united in their love of music--and infatuation with their beautiful, terrifying leader. As such, they allow Virginia to micromanage their lives, ostensibly in hopes of maximizing their potential. Laura has never been so happy--until a progressive new chaplain usurps Virginia's control over the ensemble, causing the vindictive overachiever to spiral. Burton develops what begins as an apparent Donna Tartt pastiche into a defiantly distinct meditation on power, desire, and the search for self. Events unfold from Laura's perspective via an increasingly breathless third-person-present narrative, conferring voyeuristic intimacy. Deftly drawn, deeply insecure characters complement the melodramatic plot, which crescendos to a devastating close. An incandescent exploration of adolescent angst.

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