Every Exquisite Thing by Laura Steven ​
Published by UCLan

TO retell a classic story is to take up a great challenge, with the best examples honouring the original themes by remaining true to what the original author had intended to convey.

This is exactly what Laura Steven has achieved with this modern-day feminist and sapphic imagining of the gruesome and revealing ideas put forward by Oscar Wilde in his philosophical, gothic classic The Picture Of Dorian Gray.

This feels like a novel I had been anticipating without knowing it. The original story of a young man who had a magical portrait which would age and grow ugly in his place while he indulged in increasingly reckless and dangerous behaviour, has for years, seemed to lie beneath feminist conversations on the ever-increasing desire of teenage girls to be observed favourably.

Penny Paxton has always lived in the shadows of her mother, who despite being a beloved famous model, has become cold and paranoid through years in the spotlight and battles with depression and addiction.

In the pursuit of this affection, Penny has gained entrance to the Dorian Academy for acting. While a petty rivalry with the girl she hopes to beat to the coveted part of Lady Macbeth seems to at first be just that, her world soon spins out of control in gripping and horrifying twists of fate.

There had always been legends about Dorian Academy, suggesting that the brightest stars who had once attended had done so by locking their beauty and youth in place with the help of a masked painter.

When Penny discovers the truth to these rumours, it seems an impossible gift to decline.

Central to her cruelty to her rival Davina, and her desperation for her mother’s attention is Penny’s brutal struggles with an eating disorder, which with her clarity of mind fading, and hair falling out, are damaging her performance skills.

She is certain that by freezing her body as it is, young and still beautiful, the demons of her mind will leave her, allowing her to eat as she pleases and succeed in the career she’s sure will gain her enough love and admiration from the world to heal the wounds of a sad childhood.

However, the painting does not go to plan, and worse, there is an unknown killer destroying the portraits and therefore the real people anchored to them and she may be next.

Penny’s unrelenting hunger and need to preserve conventional beauty in an attempt to gain leverage in a patriarchal society she has never quite felt connected to, both as a lesbian and the daughter of an icon, speak far beyond the personal.

They are presented in full and unflinchingly but never glamourised or condoned.

Every Exquisite Thing is exquisite, as an alluring dark academic thriller of course, but even more so as a call to teenage girls that true identity and affection are worth far more than the temporary and desperate power of beauty.