Tara Isabella Burton, author of SOCIAL CREATURE, invites her readers into the world of dark academia and secret societies in THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE, an intoxicating combination of religious zealotry and teenage obsession.

Although Laura Stearns is 16, she is what her parents and teachers call a “young” 16: sensitive, emotional and highly malleable. Although she is clearly intelligent, she is impressionable to a fault. For the past few years, she has been obsessed with the novel All Before Them, a SEPARATE PEACE-esque book written by Sebastian Webster, a “prep school prophet.” Set at Webster’s own prep school, St. Dunstan’s Academy, it is full of all the popular yet cliched dark academia tropes: hatred of the banality of the “sclerotic modern world,” an affair with the headmaster’s wife, violence, drugs and, of course, a final doomed, uncharted journey to sea.

"If there is a writer better suited than Tara Isabella Burton to join the ranks of Donna Tartt, I certainly cannot think of one. She is not only a gorgeous prose writer, but also a brave one who, even when she makes you uncomfortable, is always pushing the envelope."

In real life, Webster stole away from St. Dunstan’s one night in 1937, was baptized and crossed the Atlantic to fight --- and die --- in the Spanish Civil War at only 19. Eighty years later, his manuscript has found a cult following. St. Dunstan’s, still a mecca for his fans, has been admitting girls since the 1960s. When we meet Laura, she is on a train there to find her own “shipwreck of the soul.”

Located on the coast of Maine, St. Dunstan’s may have started admitting girls, but it still firmly holds onto its traditions, namely the mandatory singing of Evensong every Friday night. With its dark spires, lighthouse Madonna and the very bones of Webster interred below, the St. Dunstan’s chapel seems to Laura like something out of her dreams, a place that cannot possibly belong to the real world. (If you’re rolling your eyes at her, you’re not alone.) Laura is a bit disillusioned when she arrives on campus (by way of an earring-wearing Uber driver) to find not passionate, yearning youths with the hollow cheeks and dark hair of her idol, but regular students: pimpled with dyed hair and Instagram accounts. Her own roommate, Bonnie di Angelis, is well on her way to being an Instagram influencer. But everything changes when Laura attends Evensong.

The choir that leads the students in song is made up of six pupils, all boys save for the president, Virginia Strauss. Virginia is tall, severe-looking and hauntingly beautiful, but it is her seriousness that seems most familiar to Laura. Not only does she seem to possess the same conviction that Webster must have had, she appears to get it: the beauty of destruction, the necessity of faith and the meaning of transcendence. Laura works her way into Virginia’s orbit slowly, but once she breaches the inner circle, Virginia seems equally intrigued by her. She is soon inducted into the choir…and Virginia’s impassioned, fevered worldview of “the importance of moral vigor as a counterpoint to our moral lassitude.” In other words, Virginia wants to make people serious again. What could be more alluring or intoxicating to a young, sensitive, impressionable teen?

As Laura is drawn deeper into the world of St. Dunstan’s choir, Burton touches upon all the best parts of dark academia: arcane rituals, heady eroticism and the visceral threat of violence. But more significantly, she digs deep into the darkest corners of the human psyche to pose several poignant, thought-provoking questions about devotion, power, repression and the obsession of youth. When Virginia’s reign over the choir is called into question, the pace quickens and the book takes on all the edginess and voyeurism that you expect, but with a real emotional gut punch, too.

With all the hallmarks of A SEPARATE PEACE and THE SECRET HISTORY, THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE sets itself apart with Burton’s willingness to modernize the ideas of secret societies and religious fervor, placing age-old conundrums in a world of cell phones and Instagram posts for a story that it as timeless as it is fresh.

The book is powerful and shocking, but while the characters’ motivations are all expertly drawn and examined, I found myself wanting a bit more from the protagonist. Laura’s obsession with All Before Them is made clear from the start, as is her passivity in her search for meaning, but I felt she was often so passive that she fell flat on the page, especially when set against Virginia. For all her seriousness and conviction, Virginia was at her most captivating when she felt threatened, and I would have liked to have seen Laura forced out of her comfort zone and into action much sooner than she was.

If there is a writer better suited than Tara Isabella Burton to join the ranks of Donna Tartt, I certainly cannot think of one. She is not only a gorgeous prose writer, but also a brave one who, even when she makes you uncomfortable, is always pushing the envelope. Religion, idolatry, tired traditions and sex are all controversial subjects, and the idea of reading about teenagers approaching all of these topics on a remote campus is as painful and horrifying as it is endlessly alluring. However, in Burton’s hands, her characters’ motivations play against each other beautifully in a way that is intimate and erotic, yet also voyeuristic and unsettling.

Burton is not afraid to let readers know when her characters are acting dangerously or foolishly, but she does not shy away from celebrating their transcendence either. The power of THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE thrives in these contrasts.