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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4/5
Started: 12 June 2022
Finished: 14 June 2022
Summary:
When Marion moved with her mother and older sister, Charlotte, to the island of Sawkill Rock, she expected everything to be normal. She would continue to take care of her mom in her almost comatose state of grief from her husbands death, and comfort Charlotte when night came and her sadness took over. But from the moment Marion arrived on the island, things began going wrong. She was thrown from a horse and began experiencing blinding headaches that called her, with bone-aching urgency, into the woods. And girls began to go missing.
Zoey, still the outsider in Sawkill after years of living there, misses her best friend Thora, who disappeared less than a year ago. Though she's not as convinced as Thora that Sawkill Rock has some mysterious magic, she also knows that girls don't just disappear into nothing--no body, no blood, not a scrap of evidence anywhere. And while she has no proof, she has a feeling that Val, rich socialite princess of Sawkill, has something to do with it.
Val knows he is getting stronger, and she is afraid.
Thoughts:
I read this book in a haze of exhaustion from dead week and finals, but I adored it nonetheless. Probably because I was so tired, the imagery wasn't very strong in my head, but everything else was really good. I loved the casual queerness of it, as well as the feminism. Zoey was my favorite character, both because she was asexual and because she had a sort of physical and effervescent warmth that was super fun to read. Her conclusion to the story made me so so happy: her boyfriend said she didn't care if she ever wanted sex, he wanted to try being with her anyway. Like. That's so freaking adorable!! Marion was a little dry, but she was important to the story, so it was fine. And Val was super interesting as well: in love with a girl, hating herself, afraid of the monster, wanting to die but too afraid to do so. She was a contradiction in a very fun way.
The monster and the world building were very cool. I liked the violence and gore of the book. The scenes in the other world were fun. The conspiracy-brotherhood thing was super cool, as was the feminist screw-the-men, lets-create-a-sisterhood-system-that's-stronger. I kind of wish that I had waited to read this until I was clearheaded, but oh well. Maybe I'll read one of Legrand's other books at some point, instead.
A quote I loved: "they stood amid this ruination of men, hand joined and gazes locked. Then they turned, as one, and walked deeper into the forest."
Words:
esoteric (adj) intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest
chalant (adj, the neglected positive [from The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks!!!!) careful, attentive, or concerned
innocuous (adj) not harmful/offensive
pulsars (n) a celestial source of pulsating electromagnetic radiation characterized by a short relatively constant interval between pulses, that is held to be a rotating neuron star
facsimiles (n) an exact copy, especially of written or printed material