Autumn Woods’s Nightshade is a diverting, moody, and humorous romance with mature themes that throws two morose but well-meaning enemies-to-lovers into a tale of soapy, dark academia-clad suspense. It’s a contemporary dark romance that purposefully tests your suspension of disbelief and leans into atmosphere and plot. The novel’s juxtaposition of angsty and consuming youthful love with humor and dark/serious themes situates it among comparable YA to new adult romantic novels and TV dramas. Tonally, Nightshade sits somewhere on a spectrum of soapy dramas from Maxton Hall to Ginny & Georgia and High Tides (Knokke Off).

Ophelia Winters, the female main character, is a red-haired, half-Scottish and half-English, socially isolated, competitive swimmer with a penchant for crossword puzzles. Ophelia’s working-class parents were killed in a helicopter crash near Sorrowsong University. Grief-stricken, she barely graduated high school and delayed going to college after losing her parents. Shortly after the accident, she discovered that the helicopter that suspiciously malfunctioned belonged to Green Aviation. Despite promising her parents during their lifetime that she’d avoid the nefarious institute, she eventually pursues studies at Sorrowsong as a 21-year-old scholarship student to uncover what led to their tragic demise. At the time the story opens, Ophelia has spent the four years since her parents died plotting revenge against Cain Green, the unscrupulous Green Aviation CEO, and the Corbeau-Green family. Her attraction to and bond with Cain’s brooding son, Alex Corbeau-Green, leaves her conflicted about her plans to expose Cain’s history of shady dealings. As Ophelia investigates her parents’ helicopter crash, she’s met with considerable resistance, not least of which stems from an anonymous sender who threatens her with a series of cryptic emails.

The male main character, Alex Corbeau-Green, is a sable-haired, tall, green-eyed, 25-year-old rugby player of mixed English, French, and American heritage. Alex is the eldest of Cain Green’s seven children with his French-English model wife and their only son. When his mother’s mental health took a turn for the worst and his father was predictably absent, Alex dropped out of Yale and abandoned an architecture program he loved to return home to New York so he could oversee his mother’s care and help with his younger siblings. Alex struggles with expressing his emotions and most of the time feels an overwhelming sense of detachment from his surroundings. The turmoil in his family life, particularly his contentious relationship with his vicious father and the fear and obligation he feels for his mother’s wellbeing, have taken a toll. Sketching and spending time with his sisters seem to be the only things that would typically bring him joy. That is, until he encounters Ophelia and his gray days begin to feel more colorful. Alex is first intrigued, then vexed by, and ultimately utterly infatuated with Ophelia. The pull between Alex and Ophelia is an intense sense of kinship and lust sometimes bordering on trauma bonding.  

Set in a Gothic-style castle in the Scottish Highlands, Sorrowsong University is the secretive and infamous private university for the offspring of ruthless elites. A university that values the currency of knowledge, namely information as blackmail and other means of control. The student population consists of a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, although most of the characters mentioned are freshmen or higher undergrads. Students are grouped into four houses: Cortinar, Hemlock, Snakeroot, and Nightshade. Nightshade, the house to which Ophelia and Alex belong, has a reputation for being the deadliest of the four houses. Future CEOs, mafia heirs, assassins, tycoons, and investment bankers are among those who tend to matriculate under the Nightshade banner. 

Most of the chapters are told from Ophelia’s perspective, though occasionally, chapters alternate between her and Alex’s perspectives. While the chapters could have been more evenly distributed between the main characters, the POV alternation generally works. 

The book gets off to a promising, but slow start. A couple of noticeable inconsistencies emerge in the writing style and worldbuilding, inconsistencies that contribute to the initial slow pacing. Nightshade doesn’t always read as a story involving twentysomething college students, so much as one about teens in their junior and senior years of high school. In the early chapters, the fictional and unfortunately named Sorrowsong University feels more like a boarding school for privileged teenagers rather than a university for fledgling adults (e.g. first-year orientation on the first day of school, swim and other athletic team sign-ups at the end of orientation, sorting students into four houses, and a character referring to the school’s chancellor as “Principal Carmichael”). As the novel progresses, the YA feel starts to shift to something a bit older but doesn’t completely disappear. 

Was Nightshade originally conceived as a YA story centering teens? Or did Woods simply have trouble working out how to drop Ophelia and readers into the world of Sorrowsong without the obligatory exposition featuring the student orientation? Would some of the dissonance between its YA feel and older characters have been alleviated by beginning it further along into the term and setting Ophelia and Alex’s first meeting in the library or in their class?

Despite this, I was pleasantly surprised by the reading experience. With its Gothic academic setting, consumable length, unlikely yet intriguing plot, and absorbing central romance, Nightshade is a book that manages to both conjure autumnal vibes and lend itself to summer reading. I would not mind continuing the story in the second book.

LOGLINE: Four years after losing both of her parents in a fatal helicopter crash, 21-year-old Ophelia Winters searches for answers at the arcane Sorrowsong University, where she clashes with her over-privileged and bloodthirsty peers and is irresistibly drawn to Alex Corbeau-Green, the son of a man she suspects was involved in her parents’ deaths. The closer Ophelia gets to the truth, the more her and Alex’s lives become entwined, and her safety is threatened by an anonymous and sinister source.

MOOD: A soapy and angst-filled new adult offering that blends romance, off-kilter humor, suspense, and dark academia. Nightshade is a surprisingly entertaining first installment in a new two-book series that may appeal to readers aged 18+ interested in a medium-spice, minimal-gore, dark romance. Readers should take note of the author’s content warnings.  

TITLE: Nightshade (Sorrowsong University #1)

AUTHOR: Autumn Woods

GENRE: Romance, Suspense, Dark Romance, New Adult, Fiction, Dark Academia, Mystery

PUB DATE: 8 May 2025 (ebook); 24 June 2025 (paperback)

PUBLISHER: Slowburn, an imprint of Zando

LENGTH: 419 pages