I find it hard to write or think about YA fiction without thinking about Taylor Swift sometimes–in this particular case, ‘Seven’ from Folklore (2020): “Please picture me in the weeds / Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously /Any time I wanted.” Sawkill Girls is a scream of a book beneath its veneer of preppy popularity politics and teenage drama and desire: a scream of fear and despair and fury, a loud barbaric yawp against vanishing and silencing, a howl against monsters and the different shapes they take.
Sawkill Island is somewhere off the North Atlantic coast of America; it’s known widely for its beautiful horses and beautiful people:
“The houses like palaces, old but solid-hewn, grey and white and shingled. Sprawling and manicured. Careless and dignified. Old money: the taste of it sits on every tongue like a film of stale sugar.
The way the dark, rough sea bites up the shoreline. How the winds on the eastern side groan like old-time beasts turning in their sleep.” (1)
There is, of course, a price that the island pays for its prosperity, as Marion gradually discovers when she moves there with her mother and sister Charlotte after the death of her father in a car accident. Marion’s mother takes a job as a cleaner for Val’s mother; Val is the local Regina George, fascinating and malicious (harbouring a dark family secret that’s made clear to the reader but not the other characters fairly early on). Charlotte is charmed by Val, Marion is bemused by her new life, and somewhat jealous of the threat Val seems to pose to her sisterly bond and her position as the bedrock of her remaining family. Then Marion meets Zoey, the local police officer’s daughter on the wrong side of the tracks from the privileged insider crowd (slightly Veronica Mars vibes), who has her own secrets–and suspicions of Val and her family but no evidence or allies–and they begin to investigate further.
The novel is visceral–things hurt, there is no easy brushing-off and bouncing back from violence from within or without, even the land is in pain (and conscious, as we find early on). Indeed, a lot of things are conscious–or do I mean sentient–that shouldn’t be, and the novel shudders and jolts into a dark and bloody chaotic folk horror-y speculative-fictionish conspiracy-fest in the best possible way, although I’ve found myself wondering whether some things are a little too explained or satisfactorily resolved. There’s a fine line between enjoying the anxiety of ambiguity and the terror of the unexplained and being dissatisfied at a lack of resolution or too few bones for the imagination to clothe. Overall I don’t want to say too much about the plot, but narratively it switches between Val’s, Marion’s, and Zoey’s POVs, there’s some sexual and racial diversity, it’s genuinely surprising at times, and among a lot of other things, it’s a scream against the things that girls are supposed to be.
