I am starting to worry that the author and I may not be meant to be. Just like Furyborn, I genuinely liked some of the aspects of Sawkill Girls, but overall I felt like I was just slogging through. It's actually a sort of odd feeling- I can appreciate the good parts, but I can't quite connect? Well, speaking of the good parts, let's!
The Things I Liked:
- •The atmosphere was fabulous. I mean, it's supposed to feel like a creepy island that may or may not murder you, and it really fits the bill. Even the insides of the houses had an eerie vibe to them, the kind of places you can picture in a town like this one.
- •The characters were really well developed. As I'll get into more in the next section, I didn't always feel a connection with them, but I felt a lot of empathy at least? And they were developed in a way that I definitely understood and appreciated their backstories, and why they made some of the decisions they made. That is always a huge plus for me.
- •Lots of feminism vibes! Especially in the second half of the book, some dudes try to step in and "save the day". Only, as we've come to expect from groups of old white dudes, they don't actually give any fucks about the girls. Just their own nonsense agenda. I won't say more for fear of saying too much, but I loved a lot of the discussion (and action!) it fostered.
- •Tons of bisexual and asexual rep! While I can't really speak on it personally, I have read a lot of positive #ownvoices reviews, and it seemed to be handled really well, so that was fantastic. And, it felt like a truly authentic part of the story, and not just like it was thrown in. Good stuff.
The Things I Didn't:
- •It was, especially the first half, quite slow for me. I mean, I actually considered not finishing. But since I am awful at that, here we are. It did pick up toward the middle, so that's good at least.
- •I just never felt fully connected to the characters. I don't even fully know how to explain this. You know how sometimes you feel so immersed in a story that you "know" the characters? Well yeah, the opposite of that. (Yes, I am aware of my amazing eloquence here 😂)
- •I had a really hard time suspending my disbelief at times. Look, I am fully convinced that this might be a "Shannon" problem and not an actual problem that anyone else has with the book. But the whole "monster" business was a little hard for me to swallow. I haven't any idea why, again, this could be just me.
- •Perhaps it is the character connection, or the slowness, but I just had trouble becoming invested in the story. Again, I think this is something that's hard to qualify, since it's just more of a "feeling".
Bottom Line: Honestly, I think some of the problems I had with this are just random weirdness for me, and not necessarily things that other people won't like. For me, it wasn't terrible, though not particularly engaging either.