Early Review: Sawkill Girls

Sawkill Girls
Claire Legrand

Published By: Katherine Tegan Books
Publication Date: October 2, 2018
Date Read: September 8, 2018
Genre: YA - Horror
Source: ARC from Harper 365 at YALC
Format: Paperback
Pages: 447

From Goodreads:
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 is a book that I hadn't heard much about before getting given an ARC of it at this years YALC. When offered the chance to read and review this book I looked it up and jumped at the chance to read it. Sawkill Girls is drastically different from the sort of books that I usually read but it sounded creepy and fantastic. I couldn't wait to read it and I actually really enjoyed this book. Much more than I thought I would.

Sawkill Girls follows three very different girls all living on Sawkill Rock, a small coastal island. When girls start going missing regularly, Zoey and Marion are determined to figure out what happened to them, especially after Marion's beloved sister is one of the victims. But Val does everything to try and shake them off because she is hiding a dangerous secret. There is something else on this island... something that has been taking girls and with every feed he is getting stronger. Can Val, Marion and Zoey band together to destroy the monster and save everyone else? Or is the monster fated to escape and take over?

Before picking up Sawkill Girls I had read a lot of YA Fantasy books and really wanted to read something a bit different. Sawkill Girls was just what I needed. It's unique and different from anything that I have read before and it is one of the most gripping books that I have ever read. Right from the start I couldn't put this book down. I had sat down with the intention of just reading a chapter or two to see what it was like and the next thing I knew I was a good 150 pages. I was completely taken in by this unique and mysterious story.

Sawkill Girls in the first book I have read by Claire Legrand and I will definitely be picking up more of her work in the future. I enjoyed everything about this book. Her world building and characters were fantastic and the more into the story I got, the more I couldn't put it down. It's such a fantastic storyline but the characters really make this book. There are so many important and diverse aspects of these characters and I loved that. I was just rooting for them all to come out well and Claire wrote this book and her characters so emotively and it worked perfectly.

I am so glad I got the chance to review Sawkill Girls. It's definitely not the type of book I normally pick up but it has opened my mind to trying a few more books that are out of my reading comfort zone. Will I read Sawkill Girls again? Probably not. It's not the kind of book that I would enjoy reading over and over but that's nothing to do with how incredible this story is, it's just the kind of book that's so mysterious and I wouldn't read it in the same way now knowing how it ends. Although it's not one that I personally would re-read, I highly recommend it to everyone. It's such a fantastic book and I thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it.