Sawkill Girls

"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 - release date October 2, 2018

This book was CRAZY GOOD.  It was insane!  The mystery of the vanishing girls of Sawkill Island and the evil urban legend of the Collector (that may have more truth to it than the residents think...) were the perfect storm to create this excellent story.  The way the author creates the island and the characters who live on that island was fantastic and really made you care about the characters and what happens to them.

I LOVED the complexity of the characters.  You have Marion, the girl who's lost half her family and who's used to being the rock for everyone else, never having time for herself to grieve and always being the one to comfort everyone else.  As her mom calls her, the grave little mountain.  Then there's Zoey: a fierce, strong, independent woman who is going to get to the bottom of this mystery and not let anyone stand in her way.  Val is the mean, rich, entitled girl, but there's more to her than meets the eye, including her family's decades old secret.  As you find out more about her, you might start to believe that she's very redeemable (I know I did).  Even Grayson, a side character but still important in the overall story, was very adorable.  He bakes and cleans when he's nervous.  (C'mon, that's cute.)  The Collector was super creepy I hate him a lot.  (Which is the point, so the evil villain part was done flawlessly!)  Even the ISLAND ITSELF is a character which is very cool and I will talk more about that later.  There were two main ships in this book and I found both of them very good.  The things that I liked about these romances were that they were relevant to the story line so it didn't derail the plot! (Which is always good.)  One of the two ships was two girls so it was good to have some normalized LGBT representation.  On that note, one of the other characters was also asexual.  The cast of characters was also really diverse so that was cool, too.
The plot was really grabbing.  I started reading and immediately it hooked me in with all the mystery.  I really wanted to just pause time and sit down and read the entire thing all at once!  There are so many shocking moments where you'll have to do a double take and then yell and pick up the book and read as fast as you can to see what's going to happen next.  I also loved how you could guess some parts of the mystery so it felt really good because you were like haha I figured that out already! and at the same time there were plot twists that even the greatest detective wouldn't have been able to predict.  Finally, the ending was AWESOME.  WOW.  That's as much as I can say without spoiling it but even the last chapter had me pulled in.  It was...wow!

Likes/Dislikes:  I thought it was REALLY awesome how the island itself narrated some parts of the book.  I've never seen that before in my whole life!  Where else does an island have coherent thoughts and talk (in a way)?  That was the coolest concept.  As said before, I really liked how you could predict some parts of what was going to happen next but not all of it.  I loved all the main characters.  I can't even think of anything to put as a dislike for this book.  Even more of a reason why you should pick it up when it comes out!

This was definitely a 5 star book.  I recommend it to everyone who likes the paranormal or mysteries but for a more mature audience because there are some parts of the book where they do things that younger children shouldn't be reading about...but other than that I'd recommend it for anyone who wants a great autumn/Halloween time read.  Took me 5 days to read.

-Taylor

Reviewed on October 1, 2018