'Oleander' by Scarlett Drake

Oleander

Author: Scarlett Drake

Rating: A-

Vibe: A devastating, gorgeously written queer reimagining of Great Expectations that earns its agony—even when you can see the heartbreak coming a mile out.

At fifteen, Jude Alcott meets a boy named Caspien Deveraux, and the next decade of his interior life is essentially over. Beautiful, wealthy, cruel, and utterly unknowable, Caspien moves through Jude's small British town like weather—the kind you can't dress for, the kind that catches you out and ruins everything. Scarlett Drake's Oleander, an M/M reimagining of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, follows their years-long entanglement: the pining, the proximity, the betrayals, the kind of love so total it edges into possession. Told entirely from Jude's first-person POV, it's a coming-of-age story rendered in longing-soaked prose that makes you want to underline every other sentence even as you're yelling at the narrator to please, for the love of God, run.

Here's the thing about Oleander: it shouldn't work. The toxic-love-object trope is older than dirt. "I knew he was poison and I drank it anyway" has been done a thousand times in M/M romance, mostly badly. On paper, this is a long, often-predictable melodrama where you can clock the next devastation three chapters out. Reader, it works anyway.

It works because Drake writes Jude with such interiority that you stop caring whether the plot beats are familiar—what matters is what they cost him. His queer awakening at fifteen, the way Caspien becomes the central organizing principle of his emotional life, the slow corrosion that comes from loving someone who needs you to be smaller than you are—all of it is rendered with a precision that feels less like watching a romance and more like reading someone's diary you weren't supposed to find. The single POV is doing real structural work here. We never get inside Caspien's head, and that's the whole point. He stays mysterious, half-mythologized, dangerous in the specific way that mostly only exists in your own imagination—which is exactly how the boy you can't have lives in your head when you're seventeen.

And that's where Oleander really earned me. Anyone who came up gay—especially anyone who came up gay before it was easy—knows the shape of this story. The unavailable boy who becomes your entire weather system. The way you assign meaning to every glance, every brush of a hand, every cruelty disguised as banter. The way your interior life gets quietly colonized by someone who doesn't even know they're occupying it. The gay teenage years are full of Caspiens, and Jude's helpless devotion isn't pathological so much as recognizable. It's just what it looked like before any of us had language for what was happening to us. Drake gets the architecture of that obsession—the way longing and self-loathing braid together, the way wanting somebody can start to feel indistinguishable from being haunted. It's painful to read because it's true.

The supporting cast carries real weight, too. Jude's brother-in-law Luke is one of those quietly luminous side characters who functions as the moral compass the protagonists keep ignoring—the kind of person whose decency makes you a little ashamed of your own choices. The class commentary is sharp without being lecture-y. And the Britishness of the whole thing gives it a chilly, Gothic register that suits the material; this is a story that needs grey weather, old money, and the particular cruelty of English rich kids who learned how to wound from the people who raised them.

Where it stumbles: the book is long, and not every stretch earns its real estate. A few late-act turns are telegraphed so clearly that the impact is muted by the time they land—you've already grieved the thing before it happens. Jude's obsession occasionally crosses from "deeply human" into "okay my guy, I need you to log off," and there are stretches where I wanted Drake to let him grow a spine a little earlier. And while the choice to keep Caspien opaque mostly works, there are passages where it edges into frustrating—you want one real glimpse of what's underneath the cruelty, and Drake makes you wait longer than feels fair. (One more flag worth raising: this book deals with serious content—abuse, miscarriage, alcoholism, past sexual abuse of a side character—and it doesn't soften any of it. Worth knowing going in.)

But these are quibbles. What Oleander does, it does extraordinarily well. It takes a genre that too often substitutes intensity for depth and delivers actual depth. It treats queer pain and queer love as worthy of the same epic scale as the Dickens it's drawing from. And it understands the thing the best love stories always understand—that they're not really about whether two people end up together. They're about who you become while you're trying to make it work.

A solid A-. Beautiful, brutal, and self-aware enough to know exactly what kind of story it's telling. If you've ever loved someone you absolutely should not have loved—and especially if loving him taught you something about yourself you didn't want to know—Oleander will find a soft place and put a knife in it.