Sawkill Girls
4/5
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Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
“Reader, hang on for dear life. Sawkill Girls is a wild, gorgeous, and rich coming-of-age story about complicity, female camaraderie, and power.” —Sarah Gailey, author of River of Teeth
“An eerie, atmospheric assertion of female strength.” —Mindy McGinnis, author of The Female of the Species
FIVE STARRED REVIEWS
NAMED ONE OF YALSA’S 2019 BEST FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
A BRAM STOKER AWARD NOMINEE
A LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD NOMINEE
From the New York Times bestselling author of Furyborn comes a breathtaking and spine-tingling novel about three teenage girls who face off against an insidious monster that preys upon young women. Perfect for fans of Victoria Schwab and Stranger Things.
Who are the Sawkill Girls?
Marion: The newbie. 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.
Editor's Note
Atmospheric…
People murmur that a monster recently abducted one young woman on Sawkill Island, where over 20 girls have disappeared over the past century and a half. Three girls band together to get to the bottom of these mysterious disappearances. Female friendship conquers the chills to warm your heart in this atmospheric horror story.
Claire Legrand
Claire Legrand is the author of Foxheart, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, The Year of Shadows, and Some Kind of Happiness, as well as the New York Times-bestselling young adult fantasy Furyborn and its sequels. She is one of the four authors behind The Cabinet of Curiosities. Claire Legrand lives in New Jersey.
Read more from Claire Legrand
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Reviews for Sawkill Girls
247 ratings12 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/53.5 Very interesting read with great diverse characters. However, the main storyline was just not for me.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It was an interesting read although there were times where I found it a bit repetitive in drama or crisis. It caused the scenes with the villain to go from creepy to here we go again later in the book. But it was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing the story!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It had a slow start and I thought i was going to put it down. Kept going to give this book a fair shot and I started to enjoy it. Girl Power at its finest
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Oh this book was so lovely. Made my heart ache and I adored all the characters. What a beautiful description of a place. I particularly enjoyed the Rock pages. Exactly what I needed.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm sure there ARE flaws, but I've finished this on such a high. For a start it's just really great to see YA being properly genre - this is a straightforwardly fantastic horror. As well as that, it's inclusive without feeling jobsworthy, and three teenage girls get to act like teenage girls (I mean, presumably, and allowing for their circumstances) AND kick arse. It was all very invigorating and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Side note: the Hand of Light felt like a blatant dig at the Watcher's Council, and I applaud that wholeheartedly. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow! Rich prose, scary, haunting story. Creepy yet un-put-downable. Worth it.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This horror story is told by three very different girls. It takes place on Sawkill Rockthe which is the home of the rich and pretentious. It is also an island where girls have been disappearing without a trace for more than 100 years.Marion is new on the island. She and her mother and her sister Charlotte have come to make a new start after the death of her father in a car accident. Her mother has gotten a job as the housekeeper for the Mortimer family - one of the richest and with the longest history on the island. Zoey has been on the island for a while. Her father is the chief of police. But Zoey, being black and not wealthy, is a definite outsider. Her best friends are Thora and Grayson but Thora is one of the missing girls.Val Mortimer looks like she has a charmed life. She is the daughter of the Mortimers. She's beautiful and the social leader. If she beckons, everyone comes - including Thora. Val takes a liking to Charlotte and she is the next to disappear. There are interludes from the point of view of the Rock itself who sees what's going on and needs to recruit helpers to end the terror - helpers like Marion, Zoey, and Val. Meanwhile, we also find out that Val and her ancestors have been the hosts for a demon from some other world that grows only through the deaths of girls who are brought to it by the Mortimers. Val is having second thoughts about her role as a demon procurer but doesn't know what she can do to stop it. This story is really creepy which would target it for older young adult readers. There are also sexual scenes and discussions which would also be better for older students. I thought the scenes were well-done and filled with emotion. I could feel the aching need for connection that both Marion and Val were feeling.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I really enjoyed this! The horror really delivered, and I was deliciously torn on the character split between loyalties.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This book really reminded me of IT. Like if all the kids in the book were girls and if King were more interested in the girls' internal lives than in the horror element. There's the same lack of world-building and the same "Okay, so this is happening? Seriously?" conclusion. The sexuality discussions were ultra-wedged in. I know the main character (she was the main character, right?) is on a lot of reading lists as an Ace--but that's not explored. It's stated and then kinda denied at the end of the book.
Again though, I don't think I'm in the right demographic for this book. Like with Rory Power's books- I'm interested in the parts of the book the author clearly is less fascinated with. The history and the repercussions of the "event" are more what I wanted. This book is geared towards the readers who wonder "yeah she's fighting this __ that is literally *verb*ing women, but what exactly was her mother's tone over breakfast about?". - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Teenagers Marion and Charlotte move to Sawkill Island after their father's death, but it seems they entered the belly of the beast when they learn teen-aged girls have been going missing on the island, leaving no trace behind. Marion soon makes friends with fellow Sawkill transplant Zoey as well as with Val, whose wealthy family has lived on the island for generations and may know more than they let on about the mysterious disappearances. This book received some positive buzz so I was looking forward to it. My expectation was for a quick thriller involving some sort of serial kidnapper/murderer. It turns out there is actually something supernatural at work here; that in itself would be fine as I like those kinds of mysteries as well. However, I felt like the narrative was all out of whack here. For starters, the author pretty much tells you about the monster very early on, even before most of the characters know what's going on. So while some characters are just introducing the idea that there is a local urban legend that might be behind the disappearances, the reader already has met that monster. In some cases, such dramatic irony could increase the tension; instead it works here to just make the other characters' suppositions seem pointless. I did hope perhaps we might learn more about the mechanics of the supernatural events that occur, but while we learn a few more details, it wasn't really satisfactory in my opinion.In general, the book tended to have spurts of sentences that were action-packed and then long pages full of very little else. I would be fine with that if it were used for character development, but that didn't really seem to happen. The characters themselves feel rather flat; there just isn't enough given to explaining them as people before they are thrown into the action. However, I do give the author credit for some diverse representation, especially with a lesbian romance and an asexual character. Again though, these weren't fully explored as much as they could have been. On the whole, it was hard to feel particularly invested in the story when the characters weren't that compelling.That all being said, I do have to say the author's writing style in terms of sentence structure, metaphors, etc. was quite beautiful and evocative. I just wish I could have been more invested in the story itself, which in theory did sound interesting.Overall, I was pretty disappointed with this book. I don't really see the target audience of teenagers being all that into it either, but I could easily be wrong. For the audiobook listener, the reader here was just okay. She was fine with doing different character voices, but her narration voice was rather too placid for my taste.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5More like 3.5, I guess? I wasn't expecting fantasy on the world-defending scale; microcosmic fantasy is more my speed. I did really enjoy the characters and the setting, though I wanted the Rock to reach Character levels of Setting and I'm not sure it did. An interesting read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sawkill Girls is a sci-fi horror YA novel that will keep you on the edge of your seat. The town has a legend of a Collector that feeds on girls. As the creature gains strength and feeds more often, the girls must find a way to beat this creature. The creature morphs into a variety of forms and has control over many. Will the girls of Sawkill be able to bring peace to the town? Or will they all perish at the creature’s will? Amazingly haunting novel for young adults and adults alike!