joan lindsay's literary debut after a long career in the arts presents the mystery of three girls from a private and prestigious boarding school going missing while picnicking at hanging rock, australia in the year 1900, cheekily mentioning in a foreword that the events may or may not be fictional. we spend very little time with the girls (only about three chapters; a couple of pages) before they disappear into the wilderness of the dangerous hanging rock, and in the meantime we're slowly introduced to the dynamics of appleyard college (the boarding school), from its strict headmistress to the governesses and students, all very proper victorian ladies. the atmosphere built here is lovely like these beautiful girls who drink lemonade and eat valentine's day cake, and the tranquility and images of the lacey summer dresses with the sweetness of their lunch and the sleepy afternoon after a good meal, spent dozing under the shade and amongst nature, mixes wonderfully with the latent danger we know is ahead for the three star senior boarders: irma, marion, and the beloved by all miranda, who might as well be an angel.

there's clocks that stop at 12 p.m. on the dot, and the need to be barefoot, and governesses without skirts and a strange, pink cloud taking over the sky,

and then—the girls are gone, and we have a mystery. (as a huge aside, i read these while listening to this lovely playlist, and i cannot recommend it enough. so dreamy and weird, and the only thing keeping me going from going cross-eyed with some chapters, lol.) what's perhaps the most disappointing thing is how fast the picnic is done with, and how much more of the book we have left where we don't deal with the facts of the mystery almost at all, instead focusing on the aftermath for the characters surrounding the area of the hanging rock and the downfall of the college's reputation after such a tragedy.

i don't usually have a problem with uncertainty and open-endedness. i don't particularly mind them, when done right. lindsay's book became such a hit because it captivated readers with its unsolved mystery for decades, prompting invesitgations to find out if there were any facts in the story, and half the fun to those people was going back and thinking about the many, unlimited possibilities that could have occurred to make three girls disappear off the face of the earth. hanging rock has actually become actual part of australian folklore, which is amazing. i love being able to have such a connection to a good mystery in a book to the point that it prompts me to theorize on my own after the fact, to tie the strings together myself, and i wish that could've happened to me with hanging rock, too. but i found the rest of this book so boring, sadly; the latter half was very difficult to get through, and i found myself constantly irritated by the lack of any further details about the mystery that would have prompted me to think more about it, to engage with it more passionately? instead we're stuck with the hateful headmistress and the normal comings and goings of the rest of the characters, 70% of the time completely divorced from the mystery itself.

in the foreword that i circled back to after finishing the novel, it's explained that there was a missing final chapter that lidnsay's editors recommended she take out of the book before publication, where she wrote down the explanation of what happened in hanging rock, and was later posthumously published by her editor. i actually found the contents of said chapter amazing, and incredibly interesting. entirely my shit, as a matter of fact. i would have loved to have more weird happenings that vaguely hinted at that explanation, to have the uncanny sprinkled more and more throughout the novel. i also felt missing a stronger feel to who the missing girls were, to be honest. miranda in particular is ridiculously talked up by absolutely every character that appears, and yet half the time i'm like, who the hell is this person, you know? instead, the sense of intrigue kills itself at around the middle point of the story, and you're stuck with people that you don't care that much about.

i can understand why this has stuck with audiences so heavily for so many years, but i was, unfortunately, very disappointed by my own expectations of a more gothic-esque existential horror. it's a 2.5 for me. on the bright side, the book has put me in a mood to rewatch twin peaks, and i remain optimistic about checking out peter weir's 70s film adaptation, so at least that's something, i guess.