See my teardrops falling down. My wife left this sawmill town. She said sawmill life had been a sin. The gravy were too thin. Let’s saw into Sawkill Girls, by Claire Legrand.
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.
Source: Goodreads
SPOILERS BELOW
Sawkill Girls is about three girls living on the island of Sawkill Rock. Marion has just moved there along with her mother and sister after the death of her father, only for her sister to become the latest victim in a long string of disappearances of young women. Zoey has been researching the disappearances ever since her childhood friend Thora became one of the victims. And Val is from a family bound in servitude to the dark being responsible for the disappearances: an eldritch horror from another dimension that has grown stronger with each killing and will soon break free to terrorize the world. Sawkill Rock has chosen these three girls as its champions, imbuing them with supernatural powers so that they defeat the monster before its too late.
This book had some good ideas, but I didn’t really enjoy reading it. For some reason, it felt too dark, too sad, too grim for me; which I found surprising, given that when you look at the events of the plot from an objective perspective, it doesn’t seem that bad at all: the three main characters all survive and are victorious, and only two non-villain characters are horribly murdered between the start of the book and the end. That’s a practically negligible kill count compared to other books I’ve enjoyed, so why did it feel so bad to read? After thinking about, I finally put my finger on the reason: the characters are too likeable. You see, while I’ve always rolled my eyes at the type of stock idiot teen character who populates so many horror stories, reading this made me realize that such characterization actually serves a valuable purpose: you don’t feel too bad when they die, because they were kind of annoying jerks who somewhat had it coming. The victims in Sawkill Girls, on the other hand, were too well developed, making their deaths hurt too much. Hell, Thora was dead before the book even started and just Zoey’s flashbacks to her were enough to make me feel her death more keenly than certain characters from other series who got multiple books worth of page time. Which I guess is a sign of good writing on a purely technical level, but one that’s harmful to my actual enjoyment of the book. And that’s what these reviews ultimately measure – not how much abstract “quality” a book possesses on some perfectly impartial universal scale, but how much pleasure I got out of reading them. And while, again, Sawkill Girls did definitely have good parts, the depths of my emotional attachment to the characters who died proved such a downer that I came away with an overall negative feeling.
Ultimately, Sawkill Girls just isn’t the type of book I enjoy.
Final Rating: 2/5
profmorbius 