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Verdict: A 1928 boarding-school ghost story with a genuinely queasy sense of rot and a sharp, self-deceiving narrator, let down by a slow first half and an ending that declines to explain almost anything.
Best for: Readers who want sapphic gothic horror built on atmosphere, repression and schoolgirl cruelty, and who can live with a mystery that stays a mystery and a romance that stays a subplot.
Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (1.5/5 — not indexed on romance.io; desire and tension rather than sex)
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.4/5 — a 3.50 Goodreads average across 4,200 ratings, with trade raves the readers do not fully share)
Tropes: Gothic boarding school, séances and spiritualism, dead-girl mystery, rivals-to-lovers, queer awakening, unreliable narrator, closed-world horror, body horror, grief, retrospective narration.
Spoiled Milk is Avery Curran’s debut novel, a standalone from Doubleday that sits between historical sapphic fiction and outright horror: Briarley School for Girls, 1928, where the death of the school’s brightest student on her eighteenth birthday throws Emily Locke into an uneasy alliance with Evelyn, the rival she has spent years competing against for the dead girl’s attention.
It sits at a 3.50 average across roughly 4,200 Goodreads ratings, and it arrived with the kind of trade welcome most debuts never get — Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Shelf Awareness, The Guardian and The New Yorker all reviewed it, and Book Marks logs its critics’ coverage as a rave. The readers are noticeably cooler than the critics, and the gap between those two verdicts is the thing worth understanding before you start.
What Is Spoiled Milk About?
Spoiled Milk is gothic horror first and literary, character-driven fiction second, and a romance only in the margins. The setting is an English girls’ boarding school between the wars, which means everything that implies: uniforms and hierarchies, adults who do not listen, a closed world where rumour moves faster than information, and a generation of girls whose desires have nowhere official to go. Amazon files it under LGBTQ+ horror and gothic fiction rather than romance, and that is the honest shelf.
Emily Locke tells the story in first person, looking back from adulthood. She is clever, competitive and extremely good at lying to herself — about what Violet meant to her, about why Evelyn gets under her skin, about her own part in what happened. That retrospective frame is the book’s central device. It lets Curran lace every chapter with foreshadowing and dramatic irony, and it is also the source of the most divided reader reactions, because a narrator who already knows the ending can make the middle feel like waiting.
What Makes This Sapphic Gothic Horror Work
- The rot: Milk that sours, apples that ooze, beetles in the porridge. Readers single out the food-and-decay imagery as the book’s signature, and it builds a physical dread that the séances alone could not.
- Emily as narrator: Her self-deception is the most praised piece of craft among the positive reviews — obvious to the reader, invisible to her, and a precise portrait of being closeted at seventeen.
- Spiritualism done properly: Curran is completing a PhD on spiritualism and queerness, and it shows. Readers describe the séances, mediums and occult detail as well researched rather than decorative.
- The girls themselves: Kirkus calls the relationships among the girls, living and dead, the novel’s real strength, and at least one reader says the students feel like girls she could have grown up with.
- Queerness as the counter-current: Desire is what the school is trying to smother, and several reviewers read the horror as the supernatural shape of that repression rather than a separate plot.
Book Synopsis
Violet was the girl everyone at Briarley watched. The brightest student in the school, she was the centre of Emily Locke’s world in ways Emily has never allowed herself to name. Then, on her eighteenth birthday, in 1928, Violet is dead — and Emily is certain it was no accident.
So, it turns out, is Evelyn — the classmate Emily has spent years treating as her competition for Violet’s attention, and whom she cannot stand. Grief makes them allies of necessity. With nobody in authority asking the questions they want asked, the two girls turn to the one method nobody at Briarley would sanction: spiritualism. They hold a séance, and it works. Violet answers, and what she has to say is a warning.
Soon afterwards the school itself begins to sicken. Food turns in the kitchens, water runs brackish, and a wrongness settles over the school. The girls return to the séance table again and again, and each contact brings them closer to Violet and closer to danger. As the harm escalates, Emily has to decide how far she will go for a dead girl — and whether the truth about Violet, about Evelyn and about herself is something she actually wants to hear. Underneath all of it sits the question the school would rather nobody asked: what, exactly, Briarley was built on.
My Review
The atmosphere is the real achievement here, and it deserves saying first. Curran understands that the most frightening thing about a gothic school is not the ghost but the institution — the adults who will not see, the rules that exist to keep girls quiet, the way a community decides what did not happen. The rot that spreads through Briarley is a brilliant engine for that. It starts small and domestic, with food on the turn, and becomes something you can almost smell.
The second strength is Emily. A retrospective first-person narrator who is lying to herself is hard to pull off without either tipping the reader off too crudely or losing them entirely, and at her best Emily is exactly right: sharp, petty, grieving, and incapable of saying out loud what every reader can see. The rivalry with Evelyn is written the way these things actually feel at seventeen — hostility doing the work that honesty cannot.
Where it struggles is structure, and that is not a personal quibble: pacing is the single most repeated complaint in the Goodreads reviews. A good number of readers found the first half slow, and the complaint has a specific shape — the book settles into a cycle of séance, sign, death and dread that repeats without enough new information arriving. Kirkus, notably, makes the same point about repetitive foreshadowing, so on this one the critics and the readers agree. The second theme is answers. The book offers very few, and readers who wanted to know why the haunting happens, or why Violet was first, come away frustrated. A smaller group finds the final act’s escalation tips into the absurd, and some call the supporting cast forgettable.
One expectation to reset: the marketing leans on queer desire and a rivals dynamic, and the romance between Emily and Evelyn is real but secondary. Readers split on the chemistry, and nobody describes this as a love story with a horror backdrop. It is the reverse. If you came for the romance, calibrate; if you came for the ghost, you are in the right place.
My honest note: A beautifully textured debut whose patience will read as dread to some and drag to others. If you need a mystery solved, this will frustrate you. If you want to sit inside a rotting school with a narrator who cannot tell the truth, it is worth the stay.
| Element | In Spoiled Milk |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Emily Locke & Evelyn — rivals for a dead girl’s attention, drawn together by grief and a séance |
| Core tropes | Gothic boarding school, séances, dead-girl mystery, rivals-to-lovers, queer awakening, unreliable narrator |
| Setting | Briarley School for Girls, England, 1928 |
| Heat level | 1.5/5 — not indexed on romance.io; desire and tension, not explicit |
| Series | Standalone debut — the mystery stays deliberately open |
| Content notes | Death including child death, gore and body horror, lesbophobia, a teacher–student relationship, toxic friendship, fire, sexual harassment, child abuse |
How Dark and Spicy Is Spoiled Milk?
Barely spicy, genuinely dark. Spoiled Milk is not indexed on romance.io, which is itself informative — the book is not being catalogued as romance at all. Reader reports put the heat low: the desire between the girls is intense, jealous and central to the book’s meaning, but reviewers describe emotional and romantic tension rather than explicit scenes, and none I found names an on-page sex scene between the leads. That puts it at 1.5/5.
The darkness is where to calibrate. StoryGraph’s reader-submitted warnings list death, child death and gore as graphic, and readers describe the body horror escalating as the book goes on. The element worth flagging in advance is that the dead girl’s involvement with a teacher is part of the plot, which StoryGraph users tag as an adult/minor relationship. For the same low heat in a sapphic gothic register, Plain Bad Heroines and Heap Earth Upon It sit in the same band.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you read gothic fiction for atmosphere and dread, you enjoy an unreliable narrator who lies to herself more than to you, you want queer longing rather than explicit heat, and you are comfortable with a haunting that is never fully explained.
You may want to skip it if: a slow first half loses you, you need a mystery with a solution, you are here for a romance with a clear arc and an HEA, or escalating body horror and a teacher–student subplot are hard limits.
In short: a richly atmospheric sapphic ghost story that trades answers for mood, and asks you to accept the trade.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)
This is the rare sapphic title where the trade coverage is the story. Spoiled Milk was a Book Riot most-anticipated pick for 2026 and was reviewed by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Shelf Awareness, plus The Guardian, The New Yorker, The Cut, Electric Lit and Reactor, with jacket praise from Tamsyn Muir and Julia Armfield. That is how most readers found it. The reader verdict has been quieter: 3.50 across roughly 4,200 Goodreads ratings, 3.69 on StoryGraph across about 2,300, and 3.8 across 192 Amazon ratings — where, unusually, 12% of ratings sit at one or two stars. StoryGraph’s did-not-finish rate is a modest 5%, lower than the pacing complaints might suggest. There is a TikTok discovery page for the title, but I could not read TikTok or Reddit from here, so I cannot tell you how organic that activity is. The audiobook, narrated by Charlotte Ryder, runs just under eleven hours, and one listener credits Ryder’s accent and delivery with selling Emily as a character; another abandoned it over the narrator’s voice for the girls.
Prefer audio? Listen to Spoiled Milk on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The atmosphere, first and most consistently — “atmospheric” is the recurring word, and the 1920s boarding-school gloom is what the positive reviews lead with. Then the sapphic representation, which readers praise for being messy and specific rather than tidy; Curran has said herself that she wanted crueller and kinder lesbians alike on the page. The spiritualism earns its own praise for feeling researched. Emily’s self-deception wins over readers who were once closeted teenagers themselves, and a minority singles out the prose as sharp and precise. Reviewers reaching for comparisons land on Picnic at Hanging Rock, Jane Eyre, Suspiria and Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb books.
What readers argue about and complain about: Pacing, above everything. Around eleven of the Goodreads reviews I read name a slow or dragging first half, and several more describe the same cycle of séance, omen and death repeating without the plot moving. The mystery is the second theme: roughly nine reviewers say the book never explains its haunting, and several single out the question of why it happens as the one they wanted answered. Third, the ending — about six readers call it abrupt or illogical, and one describes the zombie-tinged climax as ridiculous. Beyond that, a recurring minority finds the girls annoying or one-dimensional and the retrospective foreshadowing more deflating than tense. And the romance divides: at least one StoryGraph reviewer who loved the book did not feel the chemistry between Emily and Evelyn at all, while others read their bickering as the best thing in it. The ambiguity divides too — the readers who loved the book often loved it precisely because it refuses to explain itself.
The standalone question worth asking first: Spoiled Milk is a complete standalone with no sequel announced, and it requires nothing further — but “complete” here means the story ends, not that the mystery resolves. If open endings bother you, know that going in. Curran’s next novel, Mortal Passions, is a queer vampire campus novel listed for May 2027 from Riverrun, so this is a debut with a second book already coming rather than a one-off.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Spoiled Milk a romance novel?
No. It is sapphic gothic horror with a romantic subplot. The attraction between Emily and Evelyn matters to the story, but Amazon shelves it as LGBTQ+ horror and gothic fiction, and readers do not describe it as a love story.
How spicy is Spoiled Milk?
Very low, about 1.5/5. It is not indexed on romance.io, and readers describe queer longing and tension rather than explicit scenes. The darkness comes from gore and death, not sex.
Does Spoiled Milk explain the haunting?
Not really. Readers repeatedly say the book leaves the cause of the haunting and many of its mysteries unexplained. Some find that deliberate ambiguity the point; others find it the book’s biggest frustration.
Is Spoiled Milk a standalone?
Yes. It is Avery Curran’s debut and a self-contained novel with no announced sequel. Her next book, Mortal Passions, is a separate queer vampire novel listed for May 2027.
Is there a Spoiled Milk audiobook?
Yes. Charlotte Ryder narrates it, running just under eleven hours. Listener reaction is mixed, with one reader praising her delivery of Emily and another quitting over her voice for the girls.
How scary is Spoiled Milk?
More unsettling than terrifying for most of its length, then increasingly gory. StoryGraph readers tag death, child death and gore as graphic, and the body horror escalates in the final act.
If You Loved Spoiled Milk, Read These Next
The closest match is Plain Bad Heroines, which runs a cursed girls’ school, a dead-girl legend and sapphic desire through a more playful, meta structure. If the séances are the draw, Affinity takes Victorian spiritualism and a prison visitor’s obsession to a far bleaker place. And since Tamsyn Muir blurbed this one, Gideon the Ninth offers the same gleeful gore and devotion between two rival girls in a very different universe.
For more in this register, browse our sapphic gothic romance books or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
Spoiled Milk is a debut that knows exactly what mood it wants and gets there. The decaying boarding school is a superb setting, Emily is a genuinely good unreliable narrator, and the spiritualism feels earned rather than borrowed. It is also slow to get going, repetitive in its middle, and deliberately stingy with answers in a way many readers resent. Whether that trade works depends on what you want from a ghost story — the reader who wants dread and ambiguity will be well served, and the reader who wants a solution or a romance will not. Check Spoiled Milk on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, Spoiled Milk ranks as a critically lauded sapphic gothic horror debut — rich in atmosphere and a sharp narrator, held back by pacing and withheld answers, and best approached for the mood and the girls rather than the mystery or the romance.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5
- ✓ 3.50 average across 4,222 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ Book Marks logs the critics as a rave
- ✓ Atmosphere praised across nearly every review
- ✓ Pacing is the most repeated complaint
Romance ★★★☆☆ 3/5
- ✓ Rivalry reads as displaced longing
- ✓ Bickering praised by some readers
- ✓ Queer awakening handled with specificity
- ✓ A subplot, and chemistry divides readers
Characters ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Emily’s self-deception widely praised
- ✓ Kirkus singles out the girls’ relationships
- ✓ 46% of StoryGraph readers see strong development
- ✓ Some find the cast annoying or flat
Writing ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Rot imagery is the book’s signature
- ✓ Publishers Weekly calls it lush and haunting
- ✓ Spiritualism detail reads as researched
- ✓ Repetitive foreshadowing flagged by Kirkus too
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ Grief for Violet drives everything
- ✓ Repression lands as the real horror
- ✓ 90% of StoryGraph readers tag it dark
- ✓ Repetition dulls the escalating deaths
Heat Level ★★☆☆☆ 1.5/5
- ✓ Not indexed on romance.io
- ✓ Desire central but not explicit
- ✓ Readers report minimal physical content
- ✓ Teacher–student subplot needs a warning
Ending ★★★☆☆ 2.8/5
- ✓ Complete standalone, no sequel needed
- ✓ Ambiguity is deliberate and defended
- ✓ Around nine readers wanted real answers
- ✓ Climax called abrupt by several
Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5
- ✓ Foreshadowing rewards a second pass
- ✓ Audiobook runs under eleven hours
- ✓ Atmosphere suits an autumn reread
- ✓ Slow first half discourages a return
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