If Looks Could Kill
by Julie Berry
High School    Simon    448 pp.
9/25    9781534470811    $21.99
e-book ed.  9781534470835    $10.99

This expansive historical novel with Medusa-inspired fantasy elements features Jack the Ripper, Salvation Army missionaries, and new-made Gorgons in New York’s Bowery, 1888. With two principal viewpoints, Berry alternates between the savagely misogynistic Jack and Tabitha, a young missionary whose mild interest in preaching Christian salvation matures into a concern to alleviate poverty and abuse of women. When she and Pearl, her sanctimonious partner “soldier,” realize that they’ve inadvertently helped direct a naive girl into a life of prostitution and sexual coercion, they vow to free her. Meanwhile, Jack (here cast as one of the real-life historical suspects) has arrived in New York intent on murdering and cannibalizing women; his path crosses the young women’s, with a surprising, fantastical effect of vengeance for his and others’ wrongs toward women and of female solidarity. Berry purposefully subverts consistency of tone—Tabitha’s chatty, flirtatious innocence seem at odds with the horror of Jack’s hatred, his potions concocted of organs sliced out of murdered women—but the divergent tones become one when Pearl, a survivor of rape, suddenly morphs into a viper-haired Gorgon with the power to petrify. The logistics of plot are somewhat ornate, but Berry’s call to awareness of misogyny in its many guises is strong and clear. And, as is her way (e.g., The Passion of Dolssa, rev. 3/16), she treats historical detail with a light but sure hand and religious conviction with sympathetic clarity. Background about the historical elements, including how much remains unknown about Jack the Ripper’s true identity, is appended, along with a bibliography.

From the September/October 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.