Briskly Paced An Academy for Liars Is a Delightfully Dark Twist on the Magical Boarding School Setting

Dark academia is everywhere in publishing right now. Whether it’s because of the sub-genre’s autumnal aesthetic and generally Gothic feel, or the fact that a lot of people are looking for the sort of magical boarding school vibes epitomized by Harry Potter with more adult themes. (Not to mention higher body countes.) After writing both dark historical fiction like (Year of the Witching) and some genuinely disturbing horror (House of Hunger), maybe dark academia was always going to be a natural next step for an author like Alexis Henderson, who seizes the chance to ground her morally gray characters and bloody body horror in a more contemporary setting with An Academy for Liars.
The twisty, briskly paced story—fair warning: I tore through it in two days—wrestles with questions of power, control, and agency, as well as who is (and should be) allowed access to those things. None of its characters, not even its ostensible heroine, are particularly likable people, which somehow adds to the larger emotional stakes of the story. (I don’t think anyone particularly likable would end up as a student at this particular magical institution.) And while the book tackles many themes and tropes that will be familiar to regular readers of this genre—ambition, corruption, a desperate desire to be deemed worthy by a system greater than yourself—it navigates their complexities with refreshingly clear eyes and a perspective we don’t often see represented in this space.
An Academy for Liars follows Lennon Carter, a down-on-her-luck young woman dealing with a cheating fiance and a life that feels like it’s going nowhere fast. But when she receives a mysterious phone call in a mall parking lot telling her she’s been admitted to a strange institution known as Drayton Academy, a school she had not only never applied to, but had never heard of before, she can’t help but be intrigued.
Hidden in Savannah, the seemingly age-old school of magic teaches a select group of students to harness their innate gifts of “persuasion”, an ability which, while it technically may not been mind control, isn’t all far off from it, either. Persuasion, in the strictest sense is the power to enforce your will upon the world around you, whether that means influencing the actions of others or, for a select few, manipulating reality itself. Drayton graduates tend to go on to positions of great power and influence in the realm of geopolitics and government, where they must all ask themselves what they’re willing to do in the name of the greater good. (And whether they can resist the corrupting lure of absolute power that’s essentially baked into the things they can do.)