Hannah Abigail Clarke

An outcast teenage lesbian witch finds her coven hidden amongst the popular girls in her school, and performs some seriously badass magic in the process. Skulking near the bottom of West High’s social pyramid, Sideways Pike lurks under the bleachers doing magic tricks for Coke bottles. As a witch, lesbian, and lifelong outsider, she’s had a hard time making friends. But when the three most popular girls pay her $40 to cast a spell at their Halloween party, Sideways gets swept into a new clique. The unholy trinity are dangerous angels, sugar-coated rattlesnakes, and now–unbelievably–Sideways’ best friends. Together, the four bond to form a ferocious and powerful coven. They plan parties, cast curses on dudebros, try to find Sideways a girlfriend, and elude the fundamentalist witch hunters hellbent on stealing their magic. But for Sideways, the hardest part is the whole ‘having friends’ thing. Who knew that balancing human interaction with supernatural peril could be so complicated? Rich with the urgency of feral youth, The Scapegracers explores growing up and complex female friendship with all the rage of a teenage girl. It subverts the trope of competitive mean girls and instead portrays a mercilessly supportive clique of diverse and vivid characters. It is an atmospheric, voice-driven novel of the occult, and the first of a three-book series.

The Scapegracers

menna

anyone wants to create a coven together to hex douchebags who hurt girls?

this book honestly had me at teenage lesbian witch and i loved it so much!!! the friendship!!! the magic!!! the atmosphere!!! everything is just so good!!

let me start of by talking about the friendship because it's one of my favorite things about this book!! is there something anything better than a friendship beginning with a hexing of douchebag who hurt one of them??? I THINK NOT. they also would do anything for each other??? their friendship gets so strong so fast and IM HERE FOR IT. there was this part at a party when all of them dressed up as girls from a horror movie with the hoods the color of their magic and it was so powerful i love it so much

the magic itself is nothing special just sigils and incantations but i loved every scene when they practiced a spell or made a hex or the ones at the party!!! i just love how sideways, our mc talks about it and how she feels so connected with it and it's soo good!!! the magic books are so INTERESTING they literally feel and see and can communicate with the reader and they're just SO sassy i love it!

there's also this creature called Mr.Scratch AND HE'S ONE OF MY FAVORITE EVER HE DESERVES THE WORLD

the writing takes a bit to get used to but once you do YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO STOP!! the story just pulls you in and suddenly it's over and you don't know what to do with your life because you need the sequel RIGHT NOW!!

thanks to netgalley for approving me for the arc!!!

grace richards

4.5,,, i really really enjoyed this book. the relationship between the four core girls is my favourite thing in the absolute world i would do literally anything for daisy, sideways, yates, and jing. and there’s an anthropomorphic ink devil so what more could you really want from a book. this is a must read

Didi Chanoch

This is the queer, loving, friendship focused book fans of The Craft have always wanted. This is Heathers with magic, except the Heathers are awesome and not all white and true friends and no one ever thinks JD is cool. I loved this book. I inhaled it. I am, in the words of Scott Pilgrim, in lesbians with it.

another one (bina rec) thank you! this book is so fucking good i need it to become so famous it's in every tiktok video because h.a. clarke deserves it

Ruby Kennedy

This book was really good and I loved the queer representation! My only question is if there is a second book?

luli

the secondary characters to me have more of an interesting personality than the main character herself. not to say her story is boring, but so bring light to the fact that the character is predictable and unoriginal. it’s a fun read seeing that the book is a young adult fantasy, and there are points in the story that keep you invested in the mystery and looking forward to the sequel.

mia ¿

this is what the craft (2020) could have, or should have, been.

this book had the most amazing fall/spooky/witchy atmosphere and i kinda wish i bought it so i could have the beautiful cover to stare at and also be able to read it during the month of halloween. still, i'm glad i held out to read this book until it was at least a little closer to spooky season (too bad it's 82 degrees outside today). really good and went in a direction i didn't expect. and the whole story took place over only the course of a week? amazing stuff. can't wait for the sequel. surprising 5 stars (took me a little while to get used to the very very descriptive writing style, but it contributed to the amazing atmosphere so i learned to love it).

Alexis 

I'm going to admit that this wasn't my favorite book. I couldn't connect with the characters or the story. There were a few times that things would happen and take my interest, but then I would lose interest again. I'm not sure if this was the writing or just the story.

Zoe Smolen

Love the world. Hated most of the characters. It’s so angsty and it just reads like teens trying to hard to be edgy. I’ll probably read the second one because what a cliff hanger. Also one of the best covers of the year. 

Thanks to NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

Featured on bec&books!


Representation: lesbian MC, queer/sapphic side characters, gay parents
Trigger warnings: (view spoiler)[Physical violence, kidnapping, animal violence/death, body gore, misandry (hide spoiler)]

The premise of this book?

A lesbian teen witch who lives life as a grungey outsider gets sucked into a new friend group with some “popular” girls. Things amp up as a coven is formed and the witchy group get wrapped up with a family of witch hunters.

The Scapegracers centres around a strong female group full of diversity and individuality. The story clearly pushes the idea of redefining popular “mean girls”. This is something that I can always support in YA, but I wish the story had leaned MORE into this trope. 
 
Similar to how I wish the author had leant into the “redefining mean girls” trope more, the story’s plot just left me wanting more.

And while I adore a found family trope, it was very insta-friendship. One second, Sideways is just a random they’ve hired for a party trick. Next second they are the bestest of besties. This really damaged any connection I had to the group as a reader.

Overall, this book has cemented the idea that – for me – young adult contemporary witch stories are often not it. Witches and covens promise a sense of dark grunge that is never quite reached. 


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

THE WAY THAT I'M OBSESSED WITH THIS BOOK AND EVERYTHING ABOUT IT ??

pros: the creativity all the girls sans yates had with their threats, the friendships
cons: it ended ?????

full review on my blog

zilver 

3.5 | “We want some chaos. We want havoc. Bring us hell.”

One of the epigraphs of this book is a Jennifer’s Body quote (“Hell is a teenage girl”), and I feel like that tells you a lot about this book. 

Sideways (it’s a nickname - thank god) Pike finds herself at the party of three of the most untouchable girls in her year. At school she’s mostly known for her witchery, and that’s exactly why she was asked here, to perform some magic during the halloween party. Freak everyone out. Sideways enlists the help of said untouchable trio - Jing, Daisy & Yates - and by doing so, unravels the magic the other three girls all hold inside, and binds the four of them together. 

“The magic snapped back like a rubber band. It struck hard and all at once … A jagged, painful pulse reverberated from my lungs to my core, and I heaved in a breath through my teeth, wheezed a cough. There was a whistling in my ears loud enough to rupture my skull.” 

I love how visceral magic feels. Sideways senses it in her entire body, and the writing is so reflective of that. At times it was a little overdone, but overall I think it really contributed to the atmosphere, this sense of magic being a full body experience. It brought it really close, and made it almost tangible. I think the style is one of the things that really won’t be for everybody, but it was for me. 

“‘Can girls not be soft and still be powerful?’
‘Girls can. Girls are.’”

I’ve seen some people comment on the immediacy of their friendship, but I think an event like the one they went through together is exactly the kind of thing that binds you together. And I believe in the magic of this created world enough that I can imagine if you feel magic the way they did, you’re not just going to walk away from the person who instigated it. The closeness of the girls was one of the things I liked most about this story. They’re all very different, but the way they care for each other and take care of each other without flinching, without hesitation, really appeals to me as a reader. I liked that they weren’t clean-cut, but a little (or a lot) ragged at the edges. I liked their anger, and how justified they felt in it. I liked their loyalty. 

“Feeling witchy is a large part of successfully being witchy, and nothing makes you feel powerful like surrounding yourself with gigantic dripping candles.” 

Lastly I want to point out the worldbuilding. It’s one of the things I feel ambivalent about in this book, but I’m going to start with the positives. The ideas we got - regarding covens, and spellbooks, and devils, were really interesting and exciting to me. I love when magic changes overtime, so the idea of older versus modern witch covens and traditions I think is really cool. Really liked Mr. Scratch as well - a lot of Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle vibes. 

And a small thing I wanted to point out that I very much enjoyed - the chapter titles. Not enough books make good use of them these days, and I really liked all the references. Very fun.

“There was something repugnant about the absence of rage in me. I wanted my fury back.”

Then in terms of negatives… Starting where we left off: the worldbuilding did take very very long to really get a grip on. Really just the last quarter of the book we were introduced to these concepts that I think the story as a whole would’ve really benefited from being introduced earlier. Especially because they are so fascinating! I want to know more about them! I want these girls to know more about them! Show us what they mean! 

Secondly, and I think most importantly, the plot feels flimsy. I called the ‘reveal’ in the first chapter and I don’t know if I was meant to, but if I was, then it just feels frustrating to have to wait until the absolute last moment to have it be revealed to our main characters. There are all these things happening that could be forming a plot, but they’re threads that kind of dangle. They’re not pulled tight, like the author didn’t have a good grip on them. When Sideways gets kidnapped by some weird, religious family, it’s obviously terrifying and dark, but we hear almost nothing of it after she escapes. It’s left almost entirely untouched until the end of the book, when all the threads are suddenly pulled taut, supposedly coming together, even though it feels messy and unearned. 

In addition, the writing of the characters constantly teetered on an edge for me. I know I said earlier that I really liked the writing style overall, and I did, but only just. Sometimes, the prose got too much, and I could feel myself cringe at it. Sometimes, the teenage-ness of the girls felt performative. Look, the author seemed to say, I know how teens these days act and speak. Look! Look! Look! I don’t want to have to look. I want to notice. I was on a similar edge when it came to the depiction of the girls’ queerness. I love them, I love having multiple queer girls in one gang, I’m totally here for it. But especially Sideways’ own inner monologue when it came to her attraction to girls felt sometimes a little bit too much like the author was like, hey, that joke you people on the internet always make about disaster lesbians, look! Here is one! She can’t think straight when she sees a girl! Again, I want to note that as a reader, I don’t need it shoved in my face. And obviously I don’t mean I don’t want queerness shoved in my face. I’m saying that as a queer girl (though not a lesbian) I felt the depiction really was on the edge of being performative in its intensity. 

As of right now, I am planning to read the next book in this series. I really hope it will flesh out the world and the plot, and be a more coherent story (and make this book a more coherent part of the series). 

I received a free ARC of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.

Hayley 📖🌈💜🌸

It took me almost 2 months, but I fucking did it.
3.5 stars.
If you're interested in gay witches being gay and being angsty, this book is for you.
I loved the good character driven stories, and this was one of them. Sideways and Daisy and Jing and Yates were all such interesting and multi-dimensional characters, and I loved their dynamics with each other. They were all a little bit in love with each other and I loved that. Friendships between teenage girls are so interesting and these girls were all such well written and diverse and amazing characters, and their friendships were the same. 
I could take or leave the plot/story, but the characters were what really made this book for me.


Thank you to Netgalley and Erewhon Books for the eARC.

Manon van Heumen

I so wished I loved this book. It just wasn't for me. The main issue I had was with the writing, it just didn't grip me. The conversation bored me, and there were too many swear words. The plot fell flat for me after 100 pages, and I would have loved to see more of the main character's life outside the cult. I did like the macabre atmosphere the book gave me, and that is the only reason for giving it 2 stars.

Ocean

The friendships in this book are so wholesome! I loved the magic and the relationships and I really liked Sideways' dads. It took me a little while to really get into this story but I did like it in the end. There was a few unexpected twists that made the story more interesting. Due to the ending I kind of expect there to be a sequel, because there were a few loose ends that need tying up.

The Scapegracers

Reviews