Reviewed by Ephantus Gold
Set on a leafy university campus instead of a battlefield, Zoe B. Wallbrook’s “History Lessons” takes the familiar framework of a murder mystery and spins it into something sharper, funnier, and more socially aware. At the center is Daphne, a newly hired professor at Harrison University, who is juggling all the messiness of academia including department politics, tenure pressure, and the weird rituals of faculty meetings, when a colleague ends up dead. Suddenly, she’s not just navigating office rivalries and grading stacks of papers, she’s trying to solve a crime that cuts into the very culture of the institution she’s just joined.
What immediately grabs you is Daphne herself. She’s funny, a bit nerdily intelligent, fearless in ways that she doesn’t necessarily recognize herself, and no less important, she’s one of just a few Black faculty people on campus. The fact that she is Black tints everything that she does from the way she navigates meetings to students judging her and colleagues assuming they can discount her. The novel doesn’t pound you with that, but it informs the ways that she puts together puzzles in solving that mystery. Her narrative voice is that which continually draws you in, no matter if she’s unraveling puzzles or satirizing academic mumbo-jumbo with a good one-sentence sketch. Wallbrook’s writing is fast-paced and fun to read. The chapters seemed to flip by when I read the story, often with a cliffhanger twist or a joke that made me just want to read one more time before I went to sleep. The dialogue seemed just right: professors bantering, students with their own issues, even cops getting caught up in the campus bubble. I adored that the story seemed like a campus satire at times, a cozy mystery at times, and a thriller novel at others. What readers will enjoy is that Wallbrook takes the tiny tensions of academic living and makes them dramatic and tense moments. While the novel isn’t flawless in my eyes, there are many threads going on all at once- mystery, love story, departmental intrigue, historic references. But sometimes it feels just a little overfull. The love subplot in particular doesn’t receive the same depth level of the other parts of the novel, and several of the secondary characters might have received just a little room to breathe themselves. But even with these complaints, however, not once did the novel ever run out of steam.
My big takeaway from “History Lessons” is that it’s not just a crime-solving story, but of who gets to tell history and whose voices get omitted. Wallbrook manages to do that while still writing a page-turner with humor and warmth. If you like campus novels, twisty cozy-style mysteries, or just smart, character-led novels, do look out for this one. It’s a very strong debut novel, and it feels like Daphne is a character with wonderful potential for being the center of a whole series.
