SAWKILL GIRLS by Claire Legrand – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand
Published by Katherine Tegen Books on October 2 2018
Genres: Young adult, Horror
Pages: 447
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
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The nitty-gritty: Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Stranger Things in this addictively creepy tale of evil entities, friendships and girl power.

This is my first Claire Legrand book, believe it or not, but it won’t be my last. I had a great time with Sawkill Girls, a young adult horror story that draws its strength from Legrand’s characters and the relationships they form with each other. Yes, this is a pretty horrifying story about a monster who is terrorizing the small town of Sawkill. But in my opinion, the horror takes a backseat to the characters and Legrand’s messages of friendship, love and acceptance.

The story revolves around the perspectives of three characters. Marion Althouse is sixteen, and she and her sister Charlotte and their mother have just arrived in Sawkill to work for the Mortimers, the richest family in town. Still emotionally raw from the accidental death of her father, Marion hopes the change of scenery will be just what the family needs to start a new life. Zoey Harlow has also recently suffered a loss. Her best friend Thora went missing seven months earlier, and despite her father’s job as Chief of Police, Zoey isn’t any closer to getting answers about what happened to her friend. Val Mortimer is beautiful, rich and popular, and lives in the enormous Kingshead mansion along with her mother. But Val has also lost someone close to her. In fact, over the years, many young girls have gone missing in Sawkill, and none of their bodies have ever been recovered. An urban myth is circulating around town about a beast called the Collector, although now people are beginning to wonder if that myth might have its roots in reality.

Soon after they arrive, another girl disappears, and Zoey decides to start snooping around in her father’s office, convinced that he’s hiding something from her. As Zoey, Marion and Val get to know one another, strange things start to happen. Marion falls off a horse and can suddenly hear voices. Zoey discovers a secret room behind her father’s office and finds an old journal with cryptic drawings and words. And Val seems to be deep in the center of whatever is going on in Sawkill, although she clearly hates being involved in the family legacy and wants out. At the heart of the mystery is a beast, and as more and more girls disappear, the beast is getting stronger. A secret group of men knows just how to rid Sawkill of the beast, but at what cost?

I want to kick off this review by talking about the asexual rep in this story and the relationship between Zoey and Grayson. This might be the first novel I’ve read that not only has a main character dealing with her feelings about sex, but the boy who loves her must face the fact that the girl he loves does not want to have sex with him. Grayson was one of my favorite characters in the story, even though he’s really only a side character and doesn’t get much page time (sadly!). Grayson and Zoey have had sex once, after which she broke up with him because she didn’t really enjoy it. I loved Grayson for his loyalty to Zoey, who wants to have a relationship with her anyway, even though she can’t guarantee that she’ll ever want to “do that again.” The conversations they have about Zoey’s ambivalence towards sex were so honest and eye-opening. Considering the ages of the characters, those conversations might not be completely believable, but I loved the way they communicated, and I think the way asexuality is addressed in this book is a big step forward for young adult novels.

But I know most of you are here for the horror elements, right? Legrand definitely sets a menacing tone from the beginning by dropping hints about what’s really going on in Sawkill. In fact, it takes quite some time before the reader is clued into the nature of the monster on Sawkill Rock and how it’s connected to the Mortimer family. I thought the pacing was fantastic, and the fact that there was so much up front that I just didn’t understand kept me quickly flipping pages so I could find out. There are also brief chapters interspersed here and there from a fourth point of view, that of the Rock. These chapters were completely confusing to me until all the pieces finally came together, and then they made perfect sense. I thought the author did a great job of keeping the mystery of the Collector going, and although it wasn’t too hard to figure out what was happening to the missing girls, the mystery goes much deeper than that and turns out to be extremely shocking when it’s revealed.

But despite the excitement of all the mysteries in Sawkill, what really made this story work for me were the relationships between the characters. I’ve already talked about Zoey and Grayson, but there is also a lovely relationship between Marion and Val that went against all odds and turned out to be really quite sweet. Legrand doesn’t waste time putting labels on her characters, so she doesn’t set the reader up for queer relationships. They just seemed to happen naturally, and the oddness of Val and Marion getting together was quite unexpected, but ultimately it brought tears to my eyes at the end. Part of the suspense of this story is how high the stakes are for the characters, especially for the girls of Sawkill who are aware that any one of them could be the Collector’s next victim. This makes for a poignant relationship between Marion and Val, especially when certain things about Val are revealed later in the story.

I loved Legrand’s writing for the most part, although I was confused at times by her imagery. Some of her sentences seem a bit over-the-top, and I occasionally ran across a phrase like “Red flags flapped in Zoey’s deepest gut like taut sheaths of skin,” or “Val’s lungs were stones in her chest, being screwed tighter and tighter into place by a relentless machine.” I also thought the action at the end was a little too much. There is a plot point that deals with a secret society of men who are trying to rid the world of beasts like the Collector, but the story almost didn’t need it, although it does give the author a chance to use her “girl power” theme at the end, and I always love me some good Girl Power! (Hello, Buffy!) I loved the ending, although it felt rushed to me, and I wish the author had drawn it out just a little more.

But overall, this was a fun and exciting story. If you’re looking for a good, horrific read this October, and you appreciate a story that goes deeper than just your run-of-the-mill teen horror tale, then I can safely say you’ll enjoy Sawkill Girls.

Big thanks to the publisher for supplying a review copy. Above quotes were taken from an uncorrected proof and may differ in the final version of the book.