Monday, December 7, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Scapegracers by Hannah Abigail Clarke

 




The Scapegracers is a young adult novel and a debut novel from author Hannah Abigail Clarke.  It's very much a YA novel about queer and female empowerment - and of course the magic of witches/a coven in the modern world.  This makes it essentially the third novel of this sort I've read this year* (and 2nd explicitly YA one), which is kind of unfair because while the Scapegracers hits many of the same themes of those novels, it is also very different in its direction.  

*Sarah Gailey's When We Were Magic and Alix E Harrow's The Once and Future Witches are the two books that pop up in my head*

And it's a direction that I liked a lot - this is absolutely not a subtle novel about its themes, with one major character basically explaining them out loud to the protagonist, but it weaves them in and deals with them in interesting ways.  And by themes here, I mean mainly the power of young women - young queer women particularly - in a world that tries relentlessly to keep them all down.  Add in a really strong and enjoyable protagonist and some very solid side characters, and you have a very strong book, even if it relies a little too much on the characters' being deliberately obtuse about certain things that will be obvious to the reader immediately.  
----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
Sideways Pike may be a high school senior, but she's really only used to one thing in her life: being the outcast, the weird lesbian witch girl who no one wants to hang out with.  She has her two loving dads, and the book of magic that came to her in her foster home as a child, but that's all she has - and even the magic's effectiveness is limited.  But when Sideways is paid by the three girls at the top of the town's social hierarchy - Daisy, Jing and Yates - pay her to come to one of their pre-Halloween parties and do some actual magic, the four of them - plus another gay girl Sideways has never seen before - combine to make actual indisputable magic.  

Suddenly Sideways finds herself with actual friends in the trio of other girls, friends who may be more similar to her than she could ever have thought and that's something she doesn't know how to deal with - having people close instead of wanting to push them away.  But figuring out sudden friendship is only one new difficulty of Sideways' new social standing: because the trio and her find themselves diving deep into the ideas of magic....and others in the world aren't particularly pleased about that idea - about the idea of a group of teenage girls asserting power for themselves, and are willing to do anything to try to stop them.....
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The Scapegracers is a book about young female empowerment, about queer empowerment, about friendship and the power of all of the above - and it is unapologetically not subtle about any of that.  The story is always told from Sideways' point of view, and you can see all of this from Sideways' journey, which makes up our plot: the outcast lesbian witch girl has to deal with making friends, realizing that she's not so different from them, potentially finding love, and dealing with those who would instead prefer not just that she be an outcast, but that she remain down below the others prioritized by the status quo.  But the book outright explains its themes through the voices of other characters - I think Jing gives a big speech literally spelling it out - and that's really the type of book this is: its characters are bold and blatant about what and who they are (at least to the reader, there's some self discovery and the trio only come out to Sideways individually about their own pasts and degrees of queerness, if any), and are daring anyone to question them and the themes.  

This works tremendously well and far better than it seemingly should have a right to - better still than in some of the other works I mentioned before the jump.  It helps that Sideways is a tremendous point of view - as the outcast she both has learned not to care what others think and at the same time hasn't learned how to handle having others to care about and those others' opinions.  She's both bold and brash in how she goes about things and shy and unsure at the same time, because even if being an outsider and hated can make one "strong" it also makes one weak in dealing with others - it's not necessarily a strength.  And so Sideways' journey, as well as the trio's journey along with her, really works so well at guiding the plot as she discovers what it means to care about people, to have people who care about her, and about the world of magic and power and those who want to take it away.

This setting and its world of magic and power really works well here and helps to build up the plot for the above characters as well in how well it all fits together and also in how, despite all the struggles young women have, it also provides warm spaces for them at times.  Sure you have a magic-book and item filled auction house, spooky abandoned houses, sigils and incantations that need to be more off the cuff than memorized, and that all works really well.  You also have a Christian-esque family of boys, complete with a Sheriff father, who are determined to wipe out magic from young women for no reason other than they think that's how things should be - and of course there are women and girls who will go along with that.  But you also have the auction house run by a gay man who actually wants to help, and you have Sideway's adopted parents, her two dads, who both give her complete and utter support through it all.  You have the trio, who in another story might've turned on Sideways, but here are completely genuine in their friendship of hers, and it all goes to show a plot that makes it clear: this is a world where young women/teens (and older women too) may be put down, but it's also one in which there is a space for these girls to carve out and be loved, those others be damned.  And this helps the plot never feel too negative even when bad things begin to happen, and made it hard to put the book down.  

The Scapegracers has some issues, which I should bring up as well.  While Sideways is well done and distinct, the book doesn't always do as good a job distinguishing between the rest of the girls - Daisy, Jing and Yates all have some distinguishing traits, but when they're together they often kind of blend, so it's sometimes confusing to remember who said what.  More annoyingly, the book relies upon the group having some serious obliviousness to certain things that the reader will get pretty much immediately - so for example, the seeming antagonists mention a name pretty much immediately of a person they're looking for, and the reader will know immediately who that has to be, but the characters don't figure that out till basically the very end.  Or Sideways will get herself into a situation near the end where someone is obviously manipulating her for bad ends - and is warned as such - and she goes ahead anyhow.  These things work fine in context for the story, but for a reader who has read many stories, they're kind of annoying because you just want to yell at the characters to figure it out for way way too long. 

And then there's the book's cliffhanger, which is brutal - this book wraps up the plots that matter for a first volume so it's not an unsatisfying ending, but it still leaves me wanting more in the worst way damnit.  This does not stand alone, so fair warning, but if you're willing to buy into a trilogy, The Scapegracers is well worth your time.  

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