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Book Review: Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Katherine Tegen Books, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062696601

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, MP3 CD

 

My previous experience with Claire Legrand’s work was with her extremely creepy middle-grade book The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls. I could see just from the cover and inside flap of this book that her YA work would be completely different, so I started it without any expectations except for great writing (it is, after all, on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award). The story’s bones quickly took on a predictable shape: strangers move to an isolated community where someone (usually a woman) has made a deal with an evil supernatural creature to provide human sacrifices in exchange for power, beauty, and prosperity.  The three primary characters are described on the inside cover flap in stereotypical phrases: Marion is the “new girl; Zoey is the “pariah”; and Val is the “queen bee”.  The girls as portrayed by Legrand, however, can’t be summed up so easily.

Marion’s family is moving to Sawkill Island, an exclusive community of wealthy people uninterested in anything that doesn’t directly affect them, and where her mother has taken a job as full-time housekeeper to the prominent Mortimer family. She has put her grief for her father’s sudden death on hold so she can protect her risk-taking older sister Charlotte and her suicidally depressed mother.  I must say I was impressed with how, in a few brief pages, Legrand distills the essence of what it’s like to wade through that first year after the death of a loved one. Legrand describes her as plain and awkward, in contrast to her sister, who is extroverted and social.

Shortly after she arrives, Marion starts feeling strange. She is thrown from a skittish horse and hurt badly enough that she ends up in the hospital (I was really unhappy with this part of the book, because her behavior afterwards is characterized as a “freakish” seizure, and the police chief reacts by pushing her down, straddling her, and pinning her hands to the ground. He should know better. DON’T DO THIS. Overall, I was not happy with the portrayal of seizures in this story, but this actually has the possibility of leading to real physical harm). Zoey, the police chief’s daughter, our “pariah”, is first on the scene. She’s biracial, geeky, a lower socioeconomic bracket than most of the other kids at her school, and her recent breakup with her boyfriend Grayson is the cause of much rumor and speculation (It’s an interesting reversal to have an African-American police chief, even if he is characterized by some members of the community as lazy and incompetent). Zoey is grieving the loss of her best friend, Thora, the most recent in a long string of girls who have mysteriously disappeared on Sawkill Island. The disappearances area are attributed to a local legend, a supernatural monster called the Collector. Zoey suspects that Val Mortimer, the island’s “queen bee” is behind the disappearances, but can’t prove it. We as readers know pretty quickly, though, because Val shows up at the scene after the monster that pulls her strings pushes her to make  Charlotte the next victim. Val, beautiful and charismatic, quickly claims Charlotte as a friend. I thought that Zoey and Marion would end up teaming up to protect Charlotte and take down Val and the Collector, but that’s not what happens at all.  Instead, the gruesome “deal with the devil” plot takes a left turn, and the story becomes more about relationships than fighting a “big bad”.

In an interview, Claire Legrand described Sawkill Girls as her “angry, queer, feminist novel”, and a response to slasher movie tropes like the “final girl”. I think that summary doesn’t really do the book justice. One thing that’s really great about this book is how smoothly it integrates relationships and examines the way teens navigate identities that aren’t often represented. Both Val and Marion have either had relationships or fantasies with people of both sexes, and Legrand writes them into a beautiful lesbian love story(I loathed the fact that Val and Marion specifically were in a relationship, but it was very well done). Zoey is trying to deal with the discover that she is asexual, and what that means about her relationship with her former boyfriend/best friend, Grayson, a great example of healthy masculinity.  Legrand blows up the stereotypes she assigned her primary characters by making them into prickly, angry, grieving, loving, lonely, confused girls determined to keep each other alive and save the world.  They fight, they say and do terrible and sometimes unforgivable things, but when it comes down to it they do not allow themselves to be turned against one another. This is especially clear with Zoey and Val, who have a long and difficult history. It’s a really complicated, messy way to look at girls’ relationships, and I think the horror genre gave Legrand space to work with some of these difficult and intense feelings at a heightened level.

Legrand’s challenge to the “final girls” trope is less obvious, because the initial plot doesn’t follow the pattern of a typical slasher film. The characters are better developed, and the killer isn’t a maniac in a mask. Among the three girls, none of them fits the type exactly– Zoey probably comes closest, but she isn’t conventionally attractive– and none of them dies. The plot of the book is a mess, and the relatively simple plot structure of a slasher film gets buried with the addition of patriarchal cults, tessering (a la A Wrinkle in Time), doppelgangers, a sentient island, and nightmare alternate worlds. While Legrand does a great job establishing setting and atmosphere and creating her primary characters, she has simply too much going on. There is no doubt that she can write creepy, compelling, and horrific scenes, but the pieces don’t all hang together.

While Sawkill Girls is being marketed as a YA book, and is under consideration for the Stoker Award in the Young Adult category,  I’m not sure if the audience that will appreciate it is actually a teen audience, although there are few well-written asexual or bisexual characters in the YA genre, so it’s worth reading. “New adult” readers, with enough experience to recognize and critique the tropes, will really enjoy the characters and the challenge to genre norms about girls and women. I found many parts compelling or enjoyable, but in the end, I was frustrated because the story failed to hold together. However, despite its flaws, there is much to like, or even love, in Sawkill Girls. Recommended.

Contains: body horror, murder, gore, violent and abusive behavior, gaslighting, sexual situations.

Editor’s note: Sawkill Girls is on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. 

Posted on March 27, 2019 by , Reply

Musings: A Ghost Story That Isn’t A Ghost Story: Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Atheneum, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-1481438254

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Fifteen-year-old Will’s brother Shawn has just been shot and killed by a member of a local gang. Will knows the rules: don’t cry, don’t snitch, and if someone you love gets killed, find the person who killed them and kill that person. Grieving and angry, he pries open a stuck drawer in his brother’s dresser and takes the loaded gun hidden inside so he can take his revenge. Will lives on the top floor of his apartment building, though, and he has to take the elevator down… and it’s a long way down, because on every floor, Will is forced to face the consequences of living with the rules, and of shooting to kill.

There is absolutely nothing about this book’s front, back, or inside cover that suggests that it is a ghost story.  It is dedicated to teens in detention centers. I didn’t have a clue what it was about when I initially picked it up, I just had read good things about Jason Reynolds and knew the book had won a number of awards, including the Newbery Honor (not sure how I feel about that– the audience for the Newbery is children up to age 14, and Will is 15– this is really YA). But in describing it to my mom, who has an interest in teens and gun violence, I had to explain to her that Will is confronted by ghosts while he is trapped in the elevator(ghosts are a turnoff for her).  Will’s “ghosts” aren’t very ghostly, though, which is one of the things that makes them so disorienting– Will is never quite sure whether they are alive or dead at first.

Long Way Down is a verse novel. There are frequent line breaks and plenty of white space on the page. The language is spare and powerful. Reynolds strips down feelings like grief, shame, anger, and sadness to the essentials by limiting how he puts words down on each page. Despite the pared-down text, Reynolds manages to draw the characters of Will’s ghosts with enough detail and emotional impact that readers will invest in discovering their relationships. Reynolds hasn’t written a horror story here, but it is a gripping and horrific story illustrating how this vicious cycle repeats, and the ambiguous ending is dread-inducing and heart-stopping. Highly recommended for middle, high school, and public libraries, and for readers 14-adult.

Note: Long Way Down has won a Newbery Honor Award, Coretta Scott King Honor Award, a Printz Honor Award, and is a National Book Award finalist.

Posted on December 21, 2018 by , Reply

Book Review: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Random House, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-0812985405

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Lincoln in the Bardo can be described as an American ghost story, but there is much more to it than ghosts in a graveyard. It’s not a book to zip through once and put down with the confidence that you have completely absorbed what it has to offer. Trying to describe it, and review it, has been difficult, but it is worth it. George Saunders won the Man Booker prize for literary fiction for this novel, but don’t let that influence whether you try it for yourself.

At the center of the story is the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie, and Lincoln’s grieving alone at night in the cemetery where Willie was laid to rest, although “laid to rest” isn’t really the best description for its residents. I didn’t know this, but a “bardo” is a Buddhist term for a kind of in-between or transitional state. The cemetery’s residents, who tell the majority of the story, are stuck in that transitional state, no longer alive but unable and unwilling to move on or even recognize that they are dead. When Willie arrives in the bardo, the other residents, based on their previous experience, expect that he will quickly move on, but when Lincoln returns to grieve, he promises to visit again, and Willie stays to make sure he is there when his father returns. Of course, as a ghost, he is unable to physically interact with his environment or with living people, and it isn’t as easy as it might seem for him to stay, especially without the help of the other ghosts of the cemetery. In fact, if he doesn’t move on, he may be taken by damned souls.

The narrative structure of the book is challenging. It alternates between sections that take place in the cemetery, with a variety of ghosts attempting to move the story forward, or include their own story, or push their way in, interrupting each other and editorializing on events and each other, and collections of multiple historical eyewitness accounts of the same events, mostly descriptions and opinions of the night Willie died and of Lincoln himself.

The parts in the cemetery can be very confusing, as the speakers (and there are many) are only named after they have spoken, so it’s not always clear who is telling the story. The reader certainly does get to see the democracy of death in America, though–  cemeteries include all kinds of people, from the repellent and hateful to decent and caring(and sometimes all of it in one person), but in this time, at the beginning of the Civil War, African-Americans are buried outside the fence and their ghosts have to rush the fence and fight off hateful racists to get in. Once they are in, many of them do speak up, and they remain some of the most powerful and lasting voices in the story.

The alternating sections of compiled contemporary eyewitness accounts are probably what was most fascinating to me. Many of them contradict each other: some are sympathetic, complimentary, or admiring, while others condemn him in the strongest terms. To see history, and Lincoln, through so many different eyes, is fascinating, and connects with Lincoln’s interior dialogue and terrible grief for both his own son, and for all of the sons he will be sending onto bloody battlefields, as imagined by Saunders. Even if the cemetery story is too much for you, I recommend at least looking through the book to see these accounts. About two-thirds of the way through you will find absolutely scathing comments and letters as bad as anything you can find about our president on the Internet.

While Lincoln in the Bardo can be read as a novel of historical fiction, or a portrait of grief, it can be funny, foul, and sometimes gross (I was not expecting a poop joke four pages in). There are many moments of tenderness, and, despite the grief, horror, denial, and anger that emerge in the cemetery, it is also hopeful for those in the bardo, and for freedom in America.

If you like your narratives to be straightforward, this is probably not the book for you. But if you are willing to try out this unusual narrative structure, and do some rereading for better understanding, this is a ghost story you won’t soon forget.

Contains: racial slurs, suicide, references to rape and child molestation.

Posted on November 27, 2018 by , Reply
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