Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand – Book Review

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Sawkill Girls Synopsis

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.

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand – Review

I bought a copy of Sawkill Girls at this year’s YALC (with £5 hardbacks, who can resist?!) but I didn’t have any immediate plans to read it. It was one I’d heard a lot about, but that was about it. It wasn’t massively on my radar.

However, my friends Sarah and Sophie at The Little Contemporary Corner announced that they’d chosen the book as their October read for their LGBTQ+ book club, so I decided to join in! Although their book club is hosted in-person in Manchester, they put up a Google form each month so people can still share their opinions virtually if they’re unable to attend. You can read their blog post (in which I’m mentioned!) about the book club meeting here.

Sawkill Girls is set on the mysterious island of Sawkill Rock. The story mostly follows three girls: Marion who has just moved to the island with her mum and sister Charlotte; Zoey, who moved to the island a few years ago with her father, a police officer; and Val, a queen bee whose family practically runs the whole island.

The island has a mystical and secretive history that we learn about as the story develops: for over a century, girls have been going missing, taken by an unknown force that people simply call “the Collector”. People either believe the stories or dispel them as myths. But one thing is for sure: girls are being taken, and it’s happening more frequently. What is it that is brutally stealing these girls in the night? And what can Marion, Zoe, and Val do to stop it from happening?

Review: the Story, Characters, and LGBTQ+ Representation

The Story

The general consensus of others who have read Sawkill Girls is that the beginning feels far too slow and some found it difficult to get through before the action got going. However, I found myself racing through the story almost straight away.

It’s true that the beginning feels a little bit mysterious, like we’re thrown right into the story without much of an idea what’s going on or who anyone is, but I loved it. I really like a book that makes you work things out and speculate what is going to happen, and this is definitely one of those books.

It definitely is the type of book that takes a little while to build up towards the main action, but it does, it really does. I struggled to put the book down. Not only does the story race through several crazy twists and turns and a super fast plot once the story gets going, but the chapters are mostly really short, which always makes me want to keep reading.

I finished the book on the reading retreat that I went on the other weekend, and I didn’t want to do anything but sit and read the book (and, luckily, being on a reading retreat meant sitting down and reading a book was the whole point of being there! Woohoo!)

The Characters

Sawkill Girls is a funny one for characterisations because we don’t really get an in-depth look into the characters’ backstories, their home lives, or things like that; but we still feel like we know the characters so well after reading the book.

With a combination of flashbacks, mentions of their past, and how they react to things going on around them, the story still develops characters that I felt a heck load of feelings towards. I either hated them, loved them, or had absolutely no idea what they were going to do or if I’d end up liking them or not.

I especially liked seeing two completely different sizes to Val, the “queen bee” character. I won’t tell you too much because anything I can say about her would completely ruin the plot of the book, but we see two massively different sides to her character and it tore me in two – I didn’t know whether to hate her, feel sorry for her, or root for her to succeed and escape her toxic home life. This book is great for character development alone!

LGBTQ+ Representation

One of the things that stood out to me is how great the LGBTQ+ representation is in this book. It’s so great! Again, I don’t want to spoil any of the book, but there’s a particular F/F relationship that builds up fairly unexpectedly throughout the story. I say it’s unexpected because it’s the kind of relationship I never expected to happen, but I loved it when it did. It added so much to the story while still being completely natural, and I loved how a lot of it was the characters exploring their own sexuality, potentially for the first time in one character’s case.

But the thing I especially loved was the asexual rep. This is honestly one of the BEST books for ace rep that I’ve read in a long time, because the way the character’s feelings were described summarise how I felt so perfectly. It felt like Legrand has taken my own thoughts and written them down on the page, and I identified so much with it.

There’s a lovely discussion between Zoe (the ace character) and her boyfriend Grayson that I appreciated a lot, because I hope it opens people’s eyes and helps them to understand how frustrating asexuality can feel if they haven’t experienced it themselves.

Want other books with great LGBTQ+ representation? Check out some of these:

• Last Bus to Everland by Sophie Cameron
• Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
• Wonderland by Juno Dawson
• All the Bad Apples by Moïra Fowley-Doyle
• The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta
• Proud Anthology
• Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

Overall Opinions

I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed Sawkill Girls. I never usually read horror and I don’t really read a lot of novels with a supernatural, mysterious element to them, so I was so pleasantly surprised when I finished the book and instantly wanted to turn back to the beginning and read it again.

It’s one of those books that feels almost exhausting to finish because it’s just taken you on such a journey, but you feel like you want to reread it to see how things developed from the beginning. I loved it a lot and I can definitely see it being one I bring out every Halloween to reread and get into the spooky spirit!

Have you read Sawkill Girls? What did you think?

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