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Book Review: Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand

Katherine Tegen Books, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0062696601

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, MP3 CD

 

My previous experience with Claire Legrand’s work was with her extremely creepy middle-grade book The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls. I could see just from the cover and inside flap of this book that her YA work would be completely different, so I started it without any expectations except for great writing (it is, after all, on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Award). The story’s bones quickly took on a predictable shape: strangers move to an isolated community where someone (usually a woman) has made a deal with an evil supernatural creature to provide human sacrifices in exchange for power, beauty, and prosperity.  The three primary characters are described on the inside cover flap in stereotypical phrases: Marion is the “new girl; Zoey is the “pariah”; and Val is the “queen bee”.  The girls as portrayed by Legrand, however, can’t be summed up so easily.

Marion’s family is moving to Sawkill Island, an exclusive community of wealthy people uninterested in anything that doesn’t directly affect them, and where her mother has taken a job as full-time housekeeper to the prominent Mortimer family. She has put her grief for her father’s sudden death on hold so she can protect her risk-taking older sister Charlotte and her suicidally depressed mother.  I must say I was impressed with how, in a few brief pages, Legrand distills the essence of what it’s like to wade through that first year after the death of a loved one. Legrand describes her as plain and awkward, in contrast to her sister, who is extroverted and social.

Shortly after she arrives, Marion starts feeling strange. She is thrown from a skittish horse and hurt badly enough that she ends up in the hospital (I was really unhappy with this part of the book, because her behavior afterwards is characterized as a “freakish” seizure, and the police chief reacts by pushing her down, straddling her, and pinning her hands to the ground. He should know better. DON’T DO THIS. Overall, I was not happy with the portrayal of seizures in this story, but this actually has the possibility of leading to real physical harm). Zoey, the police chief’s daughter, our “pariah”, is first on the scene. She’s biracial, geeky, a lower socioeconomic bracket than most of the other kids at her school, and her recent breakup with her boyfriend Grayson is the cause of much rumor and speculation (It’s an interesting reversal to have an African-American police chief, even if he is characterized by some members of the community as lazy and incompetent). Zoey is grieving the loss of her best friend, Thora, the most recent in a long string of girls who have mysteriously disappeared on Sawkill Island. The disappearances area are attributed to a local legend, a supernatural monster called the Collector. Zoey suspects that Val Mortimer, the island’s “queen bee” is behind the disappearances, but can’t prove it. We as readers know pretty quickly, though, because Val shows up at the scene after the monster that pulls her strings pushes her to make  Charlotte the next victim. Val, beautiful and charismatic, quickly claims Charlotte as a friend. I thought that Zoey and Marion would end up teaming up to protect Charlotte and take down Val and the Collector, but that’s not what happens at all.  Instead, the gruesome “deal with the devil” plot takes a left turn, and the story becomes more about relationships than fighting a “big bad”.

In an interview, Claire Legrand described Sawkill Girls as her “angry, queer, feminist novel”, and a response to slasher movie tropes like the “final girl”. I think that summary doesn’t really do the book justice. One thing that’s really great about this book is how smoothly it integrates relationships and examines the way teens navigate identities that aren’t often represented. Both Val and Marion have either had relationships or fantasies with people of both sexes, and Legrand writes them into a beautiful lesbian love story(I loathed the fact that Val and Marion specifically were in a relationship, but it was very well done). Zoey is trying to deal with the discover that she is asexual, and what that means about her relationship with her former boyfriend/best friend, Grayson, a great example of healthy masculinity.  Legrand blows up the stereotypes she assigned her primary characters by making them into prickly, angry, grieving, loving, lonely, confused girls determined to keep each other alive and save the world.  They fight, they say and do terrible and sometimes unforgivable things, but when it comes down to it they do not allow themselves to be turned against one another. This is especially clear with Zoey and Val, who have a long and difficult history. It’s a really complicated, messy way to look at girls’ relationships, and I think the horror genre gave Legrand space to work with some of these difficult and intense feelings at a heightened level.

Legrand’s challenge to the “final girls” trope is less obvious, because the initial plot doesn’t follow the pattern of a typical slasher film. The characters are better developed, and the killer isn’t a maniac in a mask. Among the three girls, none of them fits the type exactly– Zoey probably comes closest, but she isn’t conventionally attractive– and none of them dies. The plot of the book is a mess, and the relatively simple plot structure of a slasher film gets buried with the addition of patriarchal cults, tessering (a la A Wrinkle in Time), doppelgangers, a sentient island, and nightmare alternate worlds. While Legrand does a great job establishing setting and atmosphere and creating her primary characters, she has simply too much going on. There is no doubt that she can write creepy, compelling, and horrific scenes, but the pieces don’t all hang together.

While Sawkill Girls is being marketed as a YA book, and is under consideration for the Stoker Award in the Young Adult category,  I’m not sure if the audience that will appreciate it is actually a teen audience, although there are few well-written asexual or bisexual characters in the YA genre, so it’s worth reading. “New adult” readers, with enough experience to recognize and critique the tropes, will really enjoy the characters and the challenge to genre norms about girls and women. I found many parts compelling or enjoyable, but in the end, I was frustrated because the story failed to hold together. However, despite its flaws, there is much to like, or even love, in Sawkill Girls. Recommended.

Contains: body horror, murder, gore, violent and abusive behavior, gaslighting, sexual situations.

Editor’s note: Sawkill Girls is on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel. 

Posted on March 27, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Obsidio (The Illuminae Files_03) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, illustrations by Marie Lu

Obsidio (The Illuminae Files_03) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, illustrations by Marie Lu

Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0553499193

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Obsidio is the final volume of The Illuminae Files, preceded by Illuminae and Gemina. Illuminae started with the testimony of the Illuminae Group about the invasion of an illegal mining colony on an out of the way planet, Kerenza IV, owned by the mega-corporation Wallace Ulyanov Consortium (WUC), by a second mega-corporation, BeiTech Industries. An SOS call from Kerenza IV brought the only nearby warship of the United Terran Authority, the Alexander, to the defense of the colony. After crippling BeiTech’s jump platform and damaging its ships, and filled with refugees, along with two other ships belonging to the WUC, the Copernicus and the Hypatia, thousands of refugees escaped, chased by the crippled BeiTech ship Lincoln. The Alexander’s complex AI, AIDAN, which would have been able to speed things along, was damaged.

A bioweapon that BeiTech dropped on Kerenza IV during the attack infected hundreds of refugees, AIDAN, in an attempt to save the fleet, destroyed the Copernicus and took over the Alexander. Teenage hacker Kady Grant and her ex-boyfriend Ezra, now a pilot, take on AIDAN, and with its help destroy the Lincoln. The Alexander, now flooded with the infected, is destroyed in the successful attack on the Lincoln. Despite AIDAN’s participation in large-scale mass murder, Kady saves a copy of his programming onto her tablet before she escapes back to the Hypatia. Without any kind of jump platform, the remaining survivors of Kerenza IV must travel in real-time towards the nearest wormhole that opens to a jump station.

In Gemina, we learn that the BeiTech invasion forces at Kerenza IV has been unable to communicate with headquarters, and that a BeiTech spy embedded in communications at jump station Heimdall has been intercepting all messages from the Kerenza IV refugees. As a result, no one knows there has even been an invasion. An executive from BeiTech, learning from the spy that after many months of travel, the Hypatia is nearing the wormhole, sends a “cleanup team” to prevent the ship from getting through or any news of the attack from getting out. Heimdall’s commander’s daughter, Hanna Donnelly, and her drug dealer, Nik Malikov, are saved from being trapped by just missing the violent arrival of the assassins. Thus begins a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, with Hanna and Nik attempting to eliminate the various members of the kill team, psychotropic monsters, alternate realities, and, finally, contact with the Hypatia. Unable to save the station, Hanna and Nik collect as many station residents as they can onto the ship Mao, and flee through the wormhole, which collapses behind them.

In Obsidio, the refugees realize that there is no way for them to get back to a more central system, and the captain of the Hypatia decides their only option is to return to Kerenza IV. With the Hypatia falling to pieces, the decision is made to transfer everyone to the Mao and scuttle the ship. Kady argues in favor of leaving a beacon, with information about the attack, but the captain shuts her down. Determined that the destruction of Kerenza IV and Heimdall Station be documented, Kady resurrects AIDAN on the Mao, with the hope that, with help from Ezra, Hanna, Nik, and Nik’s hacker cousin Ella, it will compile the information. In the meantime, the adults from Heimdall have noticed that teenagers seem to be running things, and object strenuously, on the grounds that they are more qualified and have better judgement than teenagers do. AIDAN notes that there are more people on the Mao than life support is capable of supporting for the time that it will take to travel back to Kerenza IV.

Then readers get the surprise of discovering that there actually were survivors of the invasion of Kerenza IV. Not only did a significant number of the BeiTech forces end up trapped when their mobile jump platform (which could transport them to another system) was damaged, but there are still a number of miserable colonists, one of whom is Kady’s cousin Asha. When the resistance causes the deaths of the majority of techs on the planet, Asha gets a surprise– one of the replacement techs, who has been working on the jump platform, is her ex-boyfriend, Rhys, who just might be able to get a message out through BeiTech’s communications software. BeiTech is getting close to fixing its mobile jump platform, and won’t leave evidence behind, so the remaining colonists are quickly running out of time.

Horrific things happen in Obsidio. There were times I stopped breathing, or was nearly in tears. Kaufman and Kristoff do not pull their punches in describing the brutality and senselessness of war– and in this case, a war that doesn’t even attempt to disguise itself as anything else than an unapologetic attack on an economic competitor out of greed. Yet there are very few completely unsympathetic characters. What makes someone sign on to participate in a situation like this? How can someone willing to sacrifice his life for a cat command the death of innocent civilians? What makes someone whose job has been protecting others from harm lead a mutiny that ends in blood and death? Knowing that AIDAN has acted ruthlessly in the past, why does Kady keep bringing him back?

One thing that does really bother me is the way that the authors tried to humanize AIDAN. It is clear that by the end of the third book AIDAN is in love with Kady. But AIDAN, as Ella points out, is not a person, but an “it”. AIDAN’s meta-awareness is also frustrating. It somehow has realized that it is in a story and decided that “every story needs its monster”, so it will be the monster. AIDAN is the “Frankenstein” of the series, I get that, but that doesn’t need to be said over and over.

The book hangs on a million coincidences, but it does all hang together in the end.  Obsidio is creative in every way, from its design and the illustrations by Marie Lu (the book is a work of art), to the storytelling through the format of a collection of emails, instant messages, maps, and other documents. It does need to be read following the first two books in order to make sense, but, as long as all three of them are, it is absolutely worth it. I recommend reading this as a hardcover, so you can appreciate the illustrations and full-page designs, but I have also heard that it is outstanding as an audiobook. Highly recommended.

 

Posted on February 8, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Gemina (The Illuminae Files_02) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, illustrated by Marie Lu

Gemina (The Illuminae Files_02) by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, illustrated by Marie Lu

Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2016

ISBN-13: 978-0553499155

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

Gemina is the sequel to Illuminae. Illuminae is framed by a trial in which a dossier of information is submitted as part of an investigation into a megacorporation’s criminal activity. The dossier begins by telling a story about a commando attack on an illegal civilian mining colony owned by the Wallace Ulyanov Corporation (WUC) on Kerenza IV, a planet out in the middle of nowhere, by a competing megacorporation, BeiTech. A Terran Authority ship, the Alexander, that arrived in response to a distress call, and two other ships, the Hypatia and the Copernicus, escaped with many of the refugees on board. However, their ability to communicate and to travel with any speed was handicapped by damage to the ships, and especially the incredibly complex AI, called AIDAN. When AIDAN was rebooted, its perceptions of what was best for the ships caused serious damage and destruction, and the death of many of the refugees. At the end of Illuminae, the Alexander and the Copernicus have both been destroyed through a combination of a bioweapon Beitech released before the residents of the colony fled and AIDAN’s frequently homicidal choices, and the Lincoln has also been destroyed. The primary characters from that book are teenagers Kady and Ezra. Kady is an anti-authoritarian hacker genius who is able to set up a partnership with AIDAN. Ezra is her ex-boyfriend, who has been drafted as a fighter pilot.

Gemina picks up with Hypatia limping through space toward a jump point, a wormhole that would allow them to get to a jump station, Heimdall, which sits in the midst of a number of jump points and makes transit from one place to another through the jump points faster and easier. They’re desperately hoping that Heimdall is picking up their radio transmissions and coming to the rescue. Unfortunately, a BeiTech spy is embedded in the communications staff at Heimdall, and has been destroying any transmissions, so no one on Heimdall has any idea that any ship is on the way, or even that anything happened on Kerenza IV. A transmission did, however, make it through from the crippled BeiTech ship, the Lincoln,  alerting top executive Leanne Frobisher that BeiTech’s coverup isn’t as complete as she thought it was.

On Heimdall, Hanna Donnelly, the station commander’s daughter, is chatting up her drug dealer , Nik Malikov, while she prepares to make a splash at a Terra Day celebration she will be attending with her handsome, romantic, boyfriend, Jackson. Hanna may look like a fashionable, spoiled, and very privileged girl, but she’s also highly trained in strategy and martial arts (this apparently is how she spends quality time with her dad). Nik, in the meantime, has also been contacted by someone who wants to move a box of contraband into the station. A member of a family famous for their criminal dealings, he lives on the station without documentation so he can’t be easily tracked. The box arrives late, and Nik leaves to sell Hanna “dust,” the designer drug of the moment, so he’s not there when the box opens to reveal a heavily armed commando team hired by BeiTech to prevent the escape of the Hypatia, that starts its reign of terror on the station by killing almost every other member of Nik’s family.

The commandos storm the atrium, where the majority of Heimdall’s residents are celebrating Terra Day, and kill Hanna’s father. Hanna, waiting for Nik to show up, is saved because he’s late getting to her. Of all the people on Heimdall, they are the only two who have the combined luck and skill to combat the killers that have overtaken the station. It’s a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, complicated by the emotions, perceptions, and decisions of people who are not what they seem. There are stone-cold killers, spies, hackers, lovers, literal bloodsucking monsters (lanima, the source of “dust”), and evil corporate executives; there are betrayals, grief, confusion, anger, and fear; there is weird science, love, and hope in the face of horror.

Hanna and Nik, along with Nik’s hacker cousin Ella, discover the plan to eliminate the Hypatia and eventually the Heimdall, get through to the Hypatia, and with the help of Kady Grant and the remains of AIDAN on the Hypatia, manage to save many lives on the Heimdall, nearly destroy reality, save the universe, and escape through the wormhole to rendezvous with the Hypatia. Unfortunately, the wormhole is destroyed in the process, leaving the survivors of both Kerenza IV and the Heimdall far from home, and with limited options.

As with the first book, Gemina’s storytelling is unconventional, involving screenshots of messages and chats, emails, transcripts of video clips (with commentary) text designed as part of illustrations, showing movement or space, soliloquies by AIDAN, and artwork from Hanna’s journal (the journal artwork was created by Marie Lu) Page design is such an essential part of the way the book is written that I don’t think the story could be told effectively in a more traditional way. I highly recommend reading a hardcover edition: paperback won’t have the same detail and Kindle and audiobook cannot possibly do this justice.

Gemina suffers from an issue that affects many “middle” books in trilogies: while it doesn’t end in the middle of a sentence, it does end rather suddenly, leaving the reader with an unsatisfactory feeling of “wait, what happens next?” It’s also a very different book from Illuminae, much more of a horror/science fiction thriller. Hanna, Nik, and Ella are all very strong characters who developed considerably beyond their original stereotypical presentations during the story, and they’re up against the commandos, with few adults to monitor them, instead of the considerably more operatic first book with its mass murders, evacuations, space battles, military crackdowns, bioweapon-infected cannibals, and homicidal AI, in which Kady and Ezra are very much treated as teens in need of supervision. Yet the ending seemed anticlimactic, more written to lead into the third book than to finish the second. I enjoyed meeting Hanna, Nik, and especially snarky, tough, Ella (it’s great to see a disabled character portrayed as multidimensional and valued as a person) and am interested in seeing how the interactions of the people from the Heimdall and those of Kerenza IV play out in volume 3. Recommended.

 

Posted on January 25, 2019 by , Reply
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