Julia Bartz | The Writing Retreat

Book spoilers ahead–if you haven’t yet read The Writing Retreat, I suggest you turn back now.

The Reveal:

Wren and Alex’s falling out was because they slept together once and then Ren ghosted their friendship.

At the writing retreat, Roza was eccentric from the start. One night she laced the cocktails with LSD, so all the girls started tripping. Poppy told Alex that she had something to show her in the basement. Alex hallucinated that she had sex with the demoness that she was writing the book about, but really it was Taylor. When she woke up in bed, Poppy had disappeared.

While searching for Poppy, they found a door open in the basement with footprints in the snow leading outside. For some reason, Roza refused to call the police. The phone was out, the snowblower was broken, and Roza insisted that roads wouldn’t be plowed.

The girls continued to try to find answers. When Poppy had led Alex to the basement, she had said she found evidence that Roza wasn’t whom she pretended to be. Alex and Wren found a secret door in the basement and determined that it lead up to Roza’s room. Alex searched Roza’s room and found a surveillance room–Roza had been watching the girls’ every move. She found Poppy in a cell, and was knocked out with a syringe and locked up too.

Poppy was really a woman named Zoe, whose aunt had been killed by Roza. Roza had stolen Zoe’s aunt’s book and then killed her and published it as her own. Zoe was there for revenge, pretending to be the much younger Poppy. She told Alex all of this while they were locked up together. Shortly thereafter, Keira, Wren, and Taylor found them. Taylor locked the other girls in the cell too–she was in on it with Roza and her employees because she was Roza’s girlfriend. Zoe’s opinion was that Roza had lured all the girls to her house to kill them and steal their books.

Roza told them that if they continued to write, they’d be fed. If any one of them failed to write 3000 words per day, the whole group wouldn’t be fed the next day. At one point, Taylor came down with dinner. There was a scuffle when some of the girls tried to escape, and Zoe was shot and died.

Eventually Jana released Keira and Alex and told them to run, but Alex couldn’t leave Wren. She went back and tried to fight Roza, but she was recaptured. Roza said she’d have to kill Wren to be able to live. She also had Taylor kill Jana and Chitra, and Taylor died too. Keira returned to save Wren and Alex, but Roza maintained power. She locked up all three girls and escaped. (Why did Roza just let the girls go?? This whole “they got away, oh wait no they didn’t, they did again, now she caught them again” was disorienting and confusing, especially on audio).

The Ending:

In the epilogue, Alex has finished the book about Daphne. She was still friends with Keira and friendly with Wren. It wasn’t really explained how Keira got back or the picture of her dead, but she had somehow made it back to the garage, where Chitra took care of her until she was killed.

Roza texted Alex from a burner phone saying she liked Alex’s book and that she’d always be watching her.