Hardcover, 400 pages
English language
Published Sept. 15, 2020 by Kensington.
Skulking near the bottom of West High’s social pyramid, Sideways Pike lurks under the bleachers doing magic tricks for bottles of Coke. As a witch, lesbian, and lifelong outsider, she’s had a hard time making friends. But when the three most popular girls pay her forty dollars 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 jerks, and try to find Sideways a girlfriend, all while eluding the fundamentalist witchfinders hell-bent 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 is an atmospheric, voice-driven novel of …
Skulking near the bottom of West High’s social pyramid, Sideways Pike lurks under the bleachers doing magic tricks for bottles of Coke. As a witch, lesbian, and lifelong outsider, she’s had a hard time making friends. But when the three most popular girls pay her forty dollars 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 jerks, and try to find Sideways a girlfriend, all while eluding the fundamentalist witchfinders hell-bent 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 is an atmospheric, voice-driven novel of the occult that explores magic, growing up, and the complexities of friendship with all the rage of a teenage girl.
Raw and untethered - like getting strangled with every flip of the page with a kiss to the crown of my head
Queer-forward YA, the witch/lesbian metaphor is direct and unexamined, in fact all the ways in which this book plays with cliche (highschool horror clique drama) are immediate and undistanced from actually being cliche. But plausibility and flat plot points aside, I enjoyed it, good dialog and themes.
This is a decent first book but could have used some editing. The plotting was a bit uneven and one key arc basically started and then paused without explanation for the rest of the book. I liked that the characters were a breaks from a bunch of the usual genre clichés.
*I received a free review copy in exchange for an honest review of this book.
The Scapegracers is slick like new magic, fitting like a second skin. Gay witches, rural small-town queerness, the anxiety of new friendships, and the terror of being hunted.
The prose hums and clicks, conveying a train of thought without getting sidetracked. It's full of fricatives and phrases begging to be spoken into the air, hurled at the sky. The blend of literal descriptions and visceral metaphors conveys a sense of physicality, of being in a body while magic is in the air and winding through Sideways' skin. It has the teenage friend-group version of "feeling lonely in the middle of a crowd"; capturing a feeling of awkwardness and surprise at being wanted, being invited, being anywhere and having it finally feel right; dreading the possibility that it's all a trick, that anxiety that everyone is …
