I don't really know why I picked up this book...
From reading the back it has elements I suspected I may not enjoy: a group of girls who are close-knit in a grating way, Fine Arts students who take Fine Arts way too seriously, an occult ritual that results in madness. I was right, I did not enjoy these parts. Why did I want to prove myself wrong? I do have a personal connection with those (not including the occult stuff), maybe I wanted to see an echo of them in this book.
The girls may have had personalities that distinguished them from each other? I don't know, I didn't care about them individually as people. The most grating show of their closeness came at the very first chapter, which was a long paragraph that was just a list of things that mattered to them and only them. It was a list of inside jokes that you just wouldn't get because you weren't there. You ever try to have a conversation with someone that only talked with references to things only them and their friend group would understand, in a way that you felt like they were just repeating inside jokes in order to demonstrate their closeness with their friends (who may even have been present!), not really caring if you understood them the way they did? That sentence, and to an extent the book, felt like having that conversation.
(I had been that person before. I had a huge JJBA phase and my roommate and I were always insufferably referencing Jojo memes, or explaining the plot to people as if it was self-evidently enjoyable. I used to say "you either love Jojo, or you haven't read it yet", as if taste had no say in your enjoyment. I guess I loved it and it changed my life to such an extent I couldn't imagine it mattering less to people who have read it. It's been a full decade since that intense Jojo phase and I have a hard time remembering the plot, the emotional beats and the personal impact being the only things that stuck. Was my enjoyment over the novelty of the bizarrenes? It's true that it gave me an intensely joyful courage, maybe to an insufferable degree, but otherwise was my love for it that shallow? In any case, having been the person explained at, I realize I was pretty cringe.)
The impetus for the ritual was desperation -- in their final, thesis year at art school, one from their class could win a chance at a solo exhibition that guaranteed their success in the business upon graduation. They threw their slimey sexual-harassing professor under the bus in exchange for a chance at that. Even though there were five of them and only one could get the Solo.
So, I have a personal connection with the setting. I got into high school in a Fine Arts program with a small class that stuck together for those four years. Within that class there was a clique and I was in it, and I didn't think we were impenetrable but my view is limited from the inside. I don't think we were obsessed ride-or-dies or anything, and the edges of the group was fuzzy. Within that, I had my closest friends who I did so many things and was together with, and that closeness has stuck in one form or another after high school to this day. And there were people in the group I was less personally close to, but as a whole we did spend time outside of school, as well as do silly stuff, such as split the cost of a less-than-$10 grocery store cheesecake like 7-way whenever it was one of our birthdays. On the outskirts of that group we were still friendly with each other and as far as I could tell there wasn't any open hostilities. If I had to say what really made the clique, it was our proximity to our favourite Art teacher. How close we sat to him during class time (as close as at the same table, as far as the other side of the classroom), how often he made conversations with us. I'm sure there was tension I was not aware of and did not care about. I know one classmate didn't actually like him, to my utter surprise. For those of us close to him, his approval meant everything, more than the other art teachers, more than the opinion on Fine Arts in general, not like that meant anything to high school students.
The difference between my classmates and the students in the book was, we had a sense that there wasn't a job to be had in fine arts... many people in our class was taking maths and sciences, as far as I could tell only a handful of us had any intention of pursuing anything art-related professionally. Even those of us for art schools were intended for commercial arts: photography, animation, illustration. I think we fully intended on leaving fine arts aside after high school. As much exposure as we had to fine arts thanks to our favourite art teacher, we really did not see any viable stability there. We were realists.
That's why the ambition in the girls in Hyacinth just didn't click with me. As much as we loved fine arts, we really never saw a future in it. And weren't we precient about that, too? Every kind of job, even maybe especially commercial art, is fraught with fragility nowadays. In that light, a class of students with the ambition to Make It in the fine arts industry seems delusional at best, privileged at worst. That's one reason why the motive for the ritual didn't impress me.
The other reason is more personal -- I just don't want to taint my personal success if the reason for it is directly at someone else's expense. I'm a terrible capitalist. I also just don't want anything in the world nearly that much. Rituals where the sacrifice isn't personal expense is not a thing I have sympathy for (the exception being an otherwise inescapable abuse). The professor they sacrificed was absolute scum, his abuse definitely was gatekeeping success to an extent, but the motivation for the ritual was personal success not... systemic change and that just seems short-sighted to me. Not to mention the reward..... a chance at a career in fine arts....... maybe they removed one gatekeeper but the gate is still around... being kept... by many people, abusers among them.
Honestly maybe I don't get any of it. I don't get their bond... is there something exclusive to Queer Girl Bonds that I can't understand? I don't know, I consider myself queer, does that mean I'm not queer enough to get it, or something exclusionary like that? Or else, am I just looking down at fine arts because sometimes the meaning feels all made up and it's not as important as people might think? And even if at one time I was the one taking it all way too seriously, I still think you gotta be less serious about art, which makes their passion not relatable?
In my frustration at the book, I read up to the ritual, but then skipped to near the end to see what all happened. Caroline dies, the school burns down, there is no Solo. One of the moneyed girls in the group donates a house, where the protagonist and another girl lives, makes their living... somehow, and intends on hosting art residencies. The income part is very hand-waved -- how does that work? They live in the middle of nowhere, there's no real insight into how they afford their expenses. And by real, I mean the financial realities of upkeeping an old house, the accessibility of rural living, it all feels very fairy-tale like. They honestly might as well have become witches who live in a cabin in the alps.
Maybe there was something in the parts I skipped, but I don't care. If I hadn't been hooked at the ritual, if the ending didn't make me want to know what happened in between, does it deserve me reading it?