Thank you to Erewhon Books and NetGalley for the ARC.

Queer high school coven? Sign me all the way up. The Scapegracers, by Hannah Abigail Clarke, includes all the trappings of something fantastic. Although I desperately wanted to love it, ultimately it fell flat, with some awkward writing and bad pacing overpowering the fun premise.

The book starts with a bang, with Sideways Pike, our angsty queer teenager witch protagonist, doing some awesome magic that even she is impressed by. After a relatively dramatic beginning, the pacing falters and the book turns into, I’m sorry to say, something of a slog. Time and again, Clarke sets up some dramatic piece of action, only to follow it up by the most mundane, slow moving scenes imaginable. More than once, I found myself skimming through the more soporific bits of the novel, including plot expositions literally laid out in pages from a history book, until I was suddenly jolted back into the action. It is enough to give a reader whiplash.

If the pacing of the plot is sometimes tedious and often erratic, that awkwardness is reflected in the prose itself. Clarke slams from scene to scene with no transitions, a style that could feel deliberate if she did it consistently, but instead, like with so much else in this book, falls short. Clarke has a tendency to repeat turns of phrase too often, which adds to the feeling of tedium, as well as leading to characters that all sound (and act) the same.

There are good bones though, under the glacial pacing and sometimes clunky writing. This book is strongly feminist at its core. The magic is evocative and there is some excellently developed atmosphere. It cries out for a film adaptation — visuals instead of clunky prose, some actors to flesh out the slightly two-dimensional characters, and the time constraint of a two hour movie would all serve the story well.