Can't Wait Wednesday : The World Cannot Give by Tara Isabella Burton

Can't-Wait Wednesday is hosted by Tressa at Wishful Endings and gives us a chance to highlight books we are patiently waiting to fill up our TBRs with.

THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE BY TARA ISABELLE BURTON

Another day, another Dark Academia book for me to lust over. The World Cannot Give publishes in either March ( says Goodreads ) or May ( says NetGalley ) either or, I am wanting to get my hands on it and read away. You know I love me some Dark Academia stories. This one seems to have a weird religious twist so.... even better!

SUMMARY

When shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan’s Academy in Maine, she dreams that life there will echo her favorite novel, All Before Them, the sole surviving piece of writing by Byronic “prep school prophet” (and St. Dunstan’s alum) Sebastian Webster, who died at nineteen, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She soon finds the intensity she is looking for among the insular, Webster-worshipping members of the school’s chapel choir, which is presided over by the charismatic, neurotic, overachiever Virginia Strauss. Virginia is as fanatical about her newfound Christian faith as she is about the miles she runs every morning before dawn. She expects nothing short of perfection from herself—and from the members of the choir.

Virginia inducts the besotted Laura into a world of transcendent music and arcane ritual, illicit cliff-diving and midnight crypt visits: a world that, like Webster’s novels, finally seems to Laura to be full of meaning. But when a new school chaplain challenges Virginia’s hold on the “family” she has created, and Virginia’s efforts to wield her power become increasingly dangerous, Laura must decide how far she will let her devotion to Virginia go.

The World Cannot Give is a shocking meditation on the power, and danger, of wanting more from the world.

-------------