Review by Ms. Masters
TL;DR
Overall rating: 3.5/5
Genre: Horror
Length: 384 pages
One-sentence summary: Overachiever and second-most-popular girl, Maria, and her scheming girlfriend, Lily, will do anything to have Maria win the coveted Kingsley Prize, which guarantees entrance into any college and will enable the couple to stay together after high school.
Tough topics: voluntary and involuntary drug use; murder; self-harm & suicide; declining mental health; some discrimination against people with disabilities and those in same-sex relationships, although this is clearly shown to be a wrong attitude
Read-alikes: Plain Bad Heroines, by Emily Danforth; Tiny Pretty Things, by Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton; People Like Us, by Dana Mele
Available formats: Print only
The first thing you'll want to know about As I Descended is that it's based on Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. If you're familiar with the play, then you'll already know a few things about the book, too: ambition, greed, and jealousy are main topics; ghosts and other creepy things abound; and people die.
The second thing you'll want to know about As I Descended is that you don't need to have any familiarity with Macbeth to enjoy it. All of the main characters are morally ambiguous, which is way more interesting than them being perfect angels or totally evil. They are also diverse. The Macbeth (Maria) and Lady Macbeth (Lily) characters in this book are both female; one is a lesbian and also disabled, and the other is bisexual and Hispanic. Maria's best friend is a Hispanic male who is dating another guy. I appreciated all this representation and the fact that none of these identities was really the focus of the story--the characters just happened to be these things, like real people are in real life.
The book starts off with action right away and is a pretty quick read. I enjoyed the creepy bits, especially the beginning séance and the descent into guilt-induced madness experienced by several of the characters. As a retelling of Macbeth, though, the book leaves something to be desired because the stakes aren't really high enough to justify the terrible things Maria and Lily do to achieve them. Lily is going to Stanford for college and she and Maria want to stay together. Winning their high school's annual scholarship would make this easier, but there's no real reason Maria wouldn't get into Stanford on her own. Her father is a politician and she attends a private boarding school, so her family has money. She is second in her class academically, she participates in sports and extracurriculars, and she's a minority. Why doesn't she just apply to Stanford and see if she makes it in? No need to murder anyone!
Without a strong motivation to wreck havoc on their school, Maria and Lily come dangerously close to just being entitled little rich girls. Still, I think there's more to like than not in this book and would recommend it for some Halloween reading!