One of her relatives has already done that: the distant, glamorous Aunt Clare, who has somehow turned graduate study in medieval history and an interest in herbal alternative medicine into a lucrative career complete with residence in rural Italy. Heroine Lena Gereghty (as she says, it rhymes with "clarity") is a medical school dropout from a significantly less tony part of the city, the daughter expected to make it out of her neighborhood and her social class. It's a diverting adventure that modernizes Gothic conventions, a bit of a mashup of "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Rappacini's Daughter," and BREAKING BAD. TRIPPING ARCADIA takes place in the present, though: specifically, Boston's luxurious Back Bay neighborhood. Mayquist checks many Gothic boxes: a damned pair of siblings, one male and one female a patriarchal villain and a heroine eager to find out the secrets that lie beyond the manorial doors. Kit Mayquist's TRIPPING ARCADIA: A GOTHIC NOVEL is self-consciously Gothic, in the manner not of lurid eighteenth-century chapbooks or nineteenth-century penny dreadfuls, but of literary Gothic fiction.
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