Guillotine by Delilah S. Dawson

Book Review

Sarah Deeming

Dez Lane dreams of being a fashion designer, but is finding it hard to get a foot in the door. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and dating Patrick Ruskin, youngest son of Nouveau magazine’s editor-in-chief, Marie Caulfield-Ruskin, shows just how desperate she is. Patrick is the epitome of a wealthy, privileged, and entitled manchild, and Dez hates him, but Dez is willing to do whatever it takes to get an invite to the Ruskin East reunion and spend the weekend with his mother. One endorsement from Marie will set Dez up in the fashion industry.

At the Ruskin’s private island mansion, Dez encounters luxury beyond her wildest dreams. The 1% live a completely different life. And there are servants for everything. But these servants are forced to sign contracts that make them less than slaves for life, abused and mistreated, and sick of it, so they have decided to take matters into their own hands.

Guillotine is a close third-person novella about how far a person will go to achieve their goals, and it applies to every single person in the story, from the head of the Ruskin household to the lowest servant and everyone in between.

As a group of people, the Ruskin family are vile. All they want is to continue their white, male-dominated supremacy at the cost of everything and everyone else. Each person is vetted before being allowed on the island; anyone they deem undesirable is rejected, and NDAs are signed, so Dez can’t even talk about what she sees there, she can’t have any electrical devices, and she cannot wear pink as every room is decorated in a different shade of pink. Dez, who already has a low opinion of Patrick, finds new depths in her dislike of him when surrounded by his family.

This story should come with trigger warnings for torture and sexual abuse; the torture is seen on the page while the sexual abuse is discussed. This is not a story for the faint-hearted; however, the violence isn’t glorified. It works within the context of the story. And while the servants might be the ‘villains’ initially, as their stories come out, as I understood exactly how depraved the Ruskins were, I switched my allegiances. It’s an odd thing to say I enjoyed a group of people being hunted down and murdered, but that’s exactly what happened.

If you couldn’t guess, I really enjoyed Guillotine. Dez was driven, yet down to earth, with a moral compass that may have gone a little askew when she started using Patrick to achieve her goals, but it righted itself when she understood what she would be getting herself into. There was a clever link between Marie-Antoinette and the book’s title, which I appreciated, and the writing was tight. For a novella, a lot happened, but it didn’t feel rushed or forced; it was well-paced, and I couldn’t put it down. Guillotine is the first thing I’ve read from Dawson, but it certainly won’t be the last. Highly recommended.