bloodygranuaile

In September there was a day that, probably coincidentally but maybe not, was a big publishing day for YA by trans and non-binary authors, and my social media feeds were flooded with them, in one memorable case all arranged by cover color theme in a rainbow. I remember that particular display because I remember, skulking gothically all the way at the purple end, a matte black book with lavender-silver foiled lettering and some vaguely occultish-looking drawing on the front, titled THE SCAPEGRACERS. I had not been in a very YA mood lately but I also have been around publishing for long enough to know that people work very hard on book covers and you absolutely should judge them, so I clicked through, surmised that it was supposed to be sort of like The Craft but gayer, and decided that I had to read it ASAP, given this year’s rules for fiction reads. I admit I had some apprehensions because the author is like 22 and I am not ready for the zoomers to be publishing—they are too powerful already—but there are a limited number of books about socially inept queer goth girls with magic powers, and I had already read the other two earlier this year. So I borrowed THE SCAPEGRACERS as soon as I could.

THE SCAPEGRACERS takes place over one intensely action-packed week in the life of one Sideways Pike, a pile of insecurities and trauma in a leather jacket, who until this week had mostly skulked around the school being friendless in the tradition of YA protagonists--although in Sideways’ case it is because she is deliberately scary and weird and an actual witch, not because she is a quiet mousy Book Girl who the narration is convinced is sweet despite being a condescending ass to everyone (Sideways’ narration dunks on this trope pretty hard, in fact, because Sideways has a modicum of self-awareness). (As someone who moved from mousy to goth basically because it was easier than learning real social skills, I loved this.) Sideways is also extremely gay; she is known as the school’s resident lesbian while the town’s other queer girls are quietly figuring themselves out, and her narration contains a sustained intensity of Feelings About Girls that is very endearing but also definitely trips my “how do allo people live, this sounds exhausting” cranky ace wiring. Sideways lives with her two dads (actually her uncle and his partner) who run an antique shop in a house full of gothy nonsense, which is insanely adorable.

Our plot kicks off when Sideways is invited to do magic at a Halloween party hosted by the three most popular girls in school. The magic works surprisingly well, until it is rudely interrupted for mysterious reasons, and then things start getting weird, even by the standards of Sideways Pike’s life. The ensuing plot involves such rollicking shenanigans as getting kidnapped by terrible religious zealots, daringly escaping from said terrible religious zealots, breaking and entering into a magical book dealer’s to look for magical books, reluctantly befriending a disembodied demon type thing that talks like a 1950’s news anchor, another outrageous party with magic that goes uncontrollably awry, and Sideways making an absolute fool of herself over a mysterious hot girl that goes to the other high school. Since it all takes place in early October, it’s got extra Halloween vibes on top of everything else, which is extremely rad.

But the main plot point, the thing that carries the book, is that SIDEWAYS FINALLY MAKES FRIENDS, a thing she is singularly bad at. Sideways’ attempts to Not Fuck Up friend-having are very funny and should be relatable to any undersocialized disaster queer. Despite the extremely short timeframe, this book doesn’t take the tack that teenage girl friendships are fake or shallow just because they are highly volatile; rather, they are extremely intense, and that intensity gets across very well. The popular girls here--Daisy, Jing, and Yates--are also all really entertaining characters. Daisy is the mean one, not in the catty way that “most popular cheerleader” characters are often portrayed, but just openly, over-the-top casually bloodthirsty in a way that probably would have had people concerned that she’d be the next school shooter if she were a guy. I found her hilarious. Jing is slightly more normal and Yates is actually nice, which sometimes makes her the odd one out.

One thing that sort of jumped out at me and made me feel very old is that there’s a lot of casual physical affection among the friends, not just hugs but also things like impromptu piggyback rides and piling on people because it is amusing to squish them until they can’t breathe. I had to stop and think a minute and be like “Were we that touchy-feely as younguns?” and the answer is absolutely yes, I had just completely forgotten when I grew out of it. (I’m not really sure how, given that I had a number of friends over the years who were dudes between 1.5x and twice my body weight, and in the social circles where I was one of the smaller people, I was therefore the most hilarious to sit on.) Anyway, I’m old, and several months of the “stay six feet away from everybody at all times” thing appears to have sunk into my limbic system and made me even more uncomfortable getting anywhere near other humans (except, oddly enough, in big crowds, which feel nice and normal), so all this entirely normal behavior--which, objectively speaking, is probably the least weird stuff in the book--struck me as strange and confusing.

Like with any good YA book I could probably spend a lot of time discussing what it says, both implicitly and explicitly, about identity and finding your place in the world and the way you present yourself to the world, but instead I’m going to keep it brief and just say: I have never read a YA book that is so unapologetically long-winded about the joys of feeling goth as fuck, like there is an entire page about the magical potential of surrounding yourself with gigantic-ass Hammer Horror movie type candles, and Sideways’ relationship to her leather jacket is practically talismanic, which I find very relatable.

This is certainly one of my favorite reads of the year, up there with the Locked Tomb series, and for very similar reasons--extremely funny and dramatic; lots of excellent female characters; representation of self-conscious goth girls with poor social sense makes me feel Seen--and I will for sure be grabbing a copy of The Scratch Daughters as soon as it is published next year.