Kai Spellmeier's Reviews > Sawkill Girls

“Or maybe, Zoey thought darkly, legends about monsters weren’t so funny when girls were actually dying.”

We all have these unread books that we've been making love eyes at for years but somehow still never got around to reading them. Books where we just somehow know we're gonna end up liking them. This was Sawkill Girls for me. It gave me This Darkness Mine and Wilder Girls vibes, two of my favourite books in recent years. Both were dark and gritty with complex, unlikeable female protagonists. Sawkill Girls did not end up meeting all my expectations. To be fair, the bar was set super high.

Now, the beginning is the strongest part of the book. It sets the obscure, grim, unwelcoming mood and introduces three very different, very compelling main characters. Marion: grief-stricken und lonely. Zoey: ferocious and headstrong. Val: gorgeous and ice cold. A big plus is that all three girls are super queer. It promised to be a character-driven mystery novel...but it didn't fulfil that promise. The POVs started blending into each other, became messier, lost their strong individual voice. It turned out to be a fast-paced and plot-driven novel instead. Which isn't bad, I just prefer the former.

Plotwise it is again an awesome setup that becomes messier the more it develops. The mystery aspect was soon lost because the many POVs tell us everything we want to know. There isn't really much left to discover after a while. I personally found the secret cult very stereotypical and cheap. It threw me off because it felt out of place and slightly illogical at the same time. Overall, I think it's a great concept (that inspired me to write my own dark island fantasy story) but the execution isn't as strong as I wished it were.

Thumbs up for the very sapphic content and the discussion of asexuality. We don't get that in a lot of YA books (yet - I'm counting the minutes until Loveless finally finds its way into my grabby hands).

Three stars because even though it isn't the most convincing read, I still enjoyed the story and found it very enigmatic and sinister.

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