Book Reviews

Review: Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Sawkill Girls was delightfully eerie. There were morally grey character, bisexuality, some asexual feelings and a paranormal horror kind of vibe. I was actually terrified to read Sawkill Girls but I actually fell in love with it.

Summary

Beware of the woods and the dark, dank deep.

He’ll follow you home, and he won’t let you sleep.

Who are the Sawkill Girls?

Marion: the new girl. Awkward and plain, steady and dependable. Weighed down by tragedy and hungry for love she’s sure she’ll never find.

Zoey: the pariah. Luckless and lonely, hurting but hiding it. Aching with grief and dreaming of vanished girls. Maybe she’s broken—or maybe everyone else is.

Val: the queen bee. Gorgeous and privileged, ruthless and regal. Words like silk and eyes like knives, a heart made of secrets and a mouth full of lies.

Their stories come together on the island of Sawkill Rock, where gleaming horses graze in rolling pastures and cold waves crash against black cliffs. Where kids whisper the legend of an insidious monster at parties and around campfires.

Where girls have been disappearing for decades, stolen away by a ravenous evil no one has dared to fight… until now.

Review

Having only read Furyborn and Some Kind of Happiness before, Sawkill Girls is something else entirely. It’s eerie and has this distinctly dark vibe to the story. But it’s so delightfully good. Not only do we have an amazing cast of girls: Zoey, Val, and Marion, there is such a large story behind Sawkill Girls that will hook you.

First off, if I was a girl here, I’d be Zoey.

Okay moving on, let me list why I loved this book:

  • There is a delicious and deliriously complex mystery to the book. You want to always read to unravel what is going on. As we find out more and more, the scope only keeps growing. The characters keep developing, and you lose track of where the ground is.
  • The queerness is off the chart. There’s bisexuality, lesbianism, poc, and ace-spectrum feelings. I want all the queerness in this book in every book from now on. Thank you for coming to my review.
  • The ace-ness and the ways this character deals with the rhetoric is something that just gave me all the feels. Dealing with this struggle and relationships has been such a challenge, that this was really affirming to see.
  • The friendships and relationships between the three girls are amazing. It’s girls banding together, girls who are enemies, and girls who love other girls. The friendship is why I stayed in the story. I wanted to see how they’d develop, how their lives would interact. It’s a book that is founded on strong and compelling characters.
  • Legrand weaves a web we fall helplessly into. There are parts of the story from outside perspectives that give the book a haunting atmosphere. The feminism just falls off the page. It is amazing and you just want to shout out things like, “hell yeah” all. the. time.
  • The problem when a system perpetuated because that’s how it was always done by my father’s by my mother’s

In Sawkill Girls we have to find compassion and forgiveness for those who were manipulated and who made bad choices for survival. Maybe everyone isn’t exactly what we thought they were. Maybe they can be more.

Find Sawkill Girls on Goodreads, Amazon, Book Depository, and Indiebound.

Discusison

Give me all the feminist horror (but not too scary) book recs!


Share this post



One thought on “Review: Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.