Publishers WeeklyShields, author of the Mermaid S.O.S. series, takes a gothic turn in this absorbing romance. Upon her beloved grandmother's hospitalization, 16-year-old Evie is sent to one of England's most prestigious boarding schools, the Wyldcliffe Abbey School for Young Ladies, located amid gloomy moors ("Towers and battlements jutted up crazily to the sky.... It was as though I had blundered back into a bygone age"). Despite a meandering beginning, the story accelerates with the interlaced historical narrative of Lady Agnes, whose family built the abbey that has become the school. Evie's scholarship and the required chores that accompany it isolate her from her rich, snotty classmates, but life seems to improve when she meets the alluring Sebastian.
