2022 EDIT: Well.
This is certainly different to how I remember it the first time reading.
The writing and atmosphere are powerful, though perhaps too overly detailed, repetitive, and exhausting. Said writing also contains a lot of plot holes (like, Val should know when the Collector monster has taken the form of someone she knows when he's out and about - they're connected! In every way!) and inconsistencies. Examples (laid out without spoiling) include:
A very minor character is named Jane Fitzgerald, but then later she is named Jane Fitzsimmons. A traumatised character (which applies to all of them) being 'clear-eyed', and then on the next page her eyes are 'still swollen from crying' (page 347). There is an instance when two of the main girl characters teleport to the home kitchen of one of the girls, and in the next chapter another character says that the girls had suddenly appeared in the living room; said character had been in the kitchen already until they heard a crash in the living room and found the girls there (page 307). Then there's one of the girls dropping her signature baseball bat during the climax - next chapter, boom, she suddenly has it in her hands again, no explanation, no mention of her picking it up or carrying it beforehand. One girl says to the third girl that the second girl (I'm using that word a lot, aren't I?) had been trying to get her into 'Lord of the Rings'...when there was no hint of this whatsoever before, and there was no way the two would have been this chummy and leisurely in the brief, dire and deadly time they'd known each other. And what are the limits to each of the trio's superpowers? Why don't they use them more often, when they seriously need to?
There are so many continuity errors, obvious details overlooked, and I'm left wondering, "How in the demonic, cold, bleached beaches of hell did these get past an editor?"
There's also the inconsistency of Marion, one of the three power girls. The other two, Zoey and Val, are good and interesting, but Marion is all over the place. It doesn't matter how much her thoughts and feelings are overly, densely, wearily written; her words and actions make her come across as cold, selfish, thoughtless and sociopathic. Not a bit like a teenage girl suffering new, raw and immense grief for more than one dead close family member. She makes jokes and laughs in the most inappropriate moments, and it seems like everyone, even the adults, look to her as an authority figure, with all the answers, for absolutely no reason. Inexplicably, she does hold some of the right answers and ideas. This grieving, new girl on the island of Sawkill Rock. Who is described as "like a mountain" - maybe smart yet awkward - but that's no excuse. To me, it reads like bad writing.
And oh, her poor mother.
I've also caught a few times in which Zoey, a Black girl, is described to 'obey' - that's the exact word used - an instruction from a white person.
'Sawkill Girls' - what as mess. An atmospheric, unsettling mess, with clear feminist leanings and goals, but a mess nonetheless. It needed a thoroughly good edit. Still, I liked most of the characters.
Final Score: 3/5
Original Review:
'Sawkill Girls' is an awesome book. It's so good I don't know how to start.
It's like 'The Nowhere Girls', Stephen King, 'The Wicker Man' (the original), 'Charmed', 'Buffy', 'Practical Magic' (referenced even in the book), a bit of 'X-Men', strangely enough (also referenced), and every horror movie you can think of - all coming together as an intense, brutal, spellbinding and spine-tingling YA fantasy.
Three teenage girls:
Marion, the new girl on the island of Sawkill, possessing a sisterhood starfish necklace. Smart, plain, overly-responsible and overburdened by family tragedy, she is now seemingly under a different kind of painful curse since setting foot on the island. Grief is not the only thing that might kill her.
Zoey, a black girl who is not taking anyone's shit. She wants to know what the hell is going on and why so many teenage girls, including her best friend Thora, go missing on Sawkill. And so she's the Sawkill pariah. She's also dealing with issues with her ex, and currently only living friend, Grayson. She counts as the more action-orientated of the sisterhood.
And Val, the rich girl, the queen bee, the impossible beauty, the smiling face made out of breakable porcelain, the snake full of venomous lies, and literally filled with a monstrous vessel; embodying a dark secret that goes back over a hundred years. Her family life is anything but rich and privileged.
These girls will grow and develop into stronger people, who are able to be themselves and come into their own, and they grow closer together as well, in many, complex ways. They discover powers and abilities they never thought themselves capable of, and they must use them to stop a monster that's been devouring girls on Sawkill for too long. Once their powers peak and they learn to come together as friends, sisters, saviours - no girl will go missing on the creepy island again, to be mourned and then forgotten about just as quickly as the next.
Every ache, every loss, every sickness, every disturbance, every dread, every noise, every crevice, every pain felt and every ugly and depressing thought by Marion, Zoey and Val - all is written in such harrowing detail, it would be overwhelming if it also wasn't so entertaining, and I didn't care about the characters, which I did, deeply. No loss is forgotten about; no one is taken for granted and glossed over. The pain, the guilt, the hollowness, the loneliness, the raw, bloody gaps; it is real.
I was very excited to read what would happen to the three girls next, while fearing for them, and wondering what I would do in their situations. How they deal with them is extraordinary.
'Sawkill Girls' really is like a Stephen King novel, from a female perspective.
While reading, I didn't even feel the overt feminist angle and tone that other reviewers either commented on or complained about, at least until near the end. Maybe it had been subtle until then. Regardless, it is warranted social commentary for this day and age:
How often do we take for granted that girls all over the world, compared to the boys, just go missing and are never found, and we shrug and move on, from one sad news to another, failing to see a pattern, and how our own apathy and compliance only contributes to the tragedy on a wider scale. It's as simple as we are afraid to admit: generally, we don't care about women and girls as much as we should. Under the patriarchal rule, this is true: for females are rendered unimportant second-class citizens who some people would prefer not to care for individually because that would mean recognizing them as human beings. Or we think them so fragile and unable to look after themselves in the big world without men that their disappearances, their possible deaths, are kind of inevitable.
And some men in power, who fancy themselves as old-timey knights and heroes, do get off on girl-on-girl hate, and women - powerful women especially - being sacrificed for "the greater good".
Well, as the climactic battle commences, 'Sawkill Girls' will have none of that. Marion, Zoey and Val are anti-girl-on-girl-hate, while acknowledging that everyone is flawed, and forgiveness cannot and should not easily be sold. It must be earned. Through a series of horrifying events (white-eyed doppelgangers, and pulling horsehair right out of one's throat, come to mind), they will earn each other's trust, and need one another to survive. It's well-crafted and developed teamwork and friendship.
'Sawkill Girls' is not anti-men. I don't know where that accusation came from. It is anti-shitty men, yes, but there are genuine good guys in the book as well, like Grayson, and Zoey's police officer dad. Val's family, the Mortimers, are a matriarchy, but they are evil only because they have been forced to serve a monster who has been using their bodies for his own sick, twisted purposes, ever since Val's ancestor made a deal with him in order to save herself from her abusive husband.
Predators come in more than one form, and the awful truth is that the patriarchy has carelessly deemed them to be the "dominating" male, targeting the "weak" female.
One quote out of a myriad which sticks to me is:
'Zoey's laugh was bitter. "Oh, and we poor delicate girls are vulnerable and desperate, is that what you're saying?"
"What I'm saying," Marion said, now looking right at Zoey, her gray eyes bright, "is that girls hunger. And we're taught, from the moment out brains can take it, that there isn't enough food for us all."' (page 261)
The diversity: Marion is hinted to be bisexual, and moves into a sexual relationship with a girl (I won't say who it is due to spoilers). Zoey is black and asexual, but is still very close to Grayson, who remains in love with her, and it is acknowledged that they don't have to be sexual with each other in order to be friends, or more. It's complicated, like a lot of relationships in this novel (shout-out to Zoey and her secretive father, too). In fact, Zoey is super close to everyone she spends time with - she loved her best friend Thora and she misses her terribly (they wrote books and fanfiction together; this is too adorable and sad), and she becomes protective of Marion, even comfortable with sharing a bed with her. She could merely be lonely, and that's understandable, but maybe she's biromantic, as well? Val may date guys, but that's only because it's required of her; for picking out a mate for procreation. She likes girls, and not in the predatory sense that the monster that controls her life and family wants her to.
Each girl plays against her type, her expected role, and it is smashing.
That ending: What frightening, star-studded epicness. It might make you cry either ugly tears or happy tears.
Also included are moths - surprisingly friendly ones, not like the ones in 'Doctor Who' - and scared horses who run off of cliffs. Even Sawkill itself, a rock, is given a character - its own POV chapters. It might be Mother Nature herself, trying what she can to help her girls living on her island, in order to fight the invader; a murderous plague, widely mistaken for an urban legend, that only the rock and a few others - good and bad - notice.
The book might be a bigger metaphor for the patriarchal world than I initially thought.
'Sawkill Girls' - Excellent writing, grisly, bloody and creepy horror for YA, nuanced female empowerment (that don't just involve superpowers), and exciting plot and character developments. Thrilling and disturbing, it gets better and better as I read on. It is breathtaking.
There are little things that could have been better, like the one page (179) where Marion says to Zoey that maybe a few girls going missing on the island every year isn't too bad, or it could have been worse. And this is AFTER another tragedy strikes in her life, on Sawkill. Zoey, of all people, lets this slide. What the hell?
But I wholeheartedly recommend this. Feminism in the supernatural hasn't looked so honest, and legitimate, and raw. Get ready to feel fear, sadness, grief, anger, and hope. For a better world, run by brave girls such as these.
Final Score: 4/5
No comments:
Post a Comment