Alexandra Pierce Reviews The Feast Makers by H.A. Clarke
The Feast Makers, H. A. Clarke (Erewhon Books 978-1-64566-081-1, 405pp, $18.95, hc). Cover by Anka Lavriv. March 2024.
The Feast Makers is the third book in the Scapegracers trilogy; there are a lot of spoilers for The Scapegracers and The Scratch Daughters in this review.
As The Feast Makers opens, Sideways Pike faces hardships that fall into two camps. The first is being a butch lesbian high school senior in a small, often bigoted, town. The other is the existence of witchfinders who don’t believe witches should be allowed to keep their specter (the organ that allows witches to do magic) and will forcibly remove said specter if they can. Sideways has already dealt with a lot of hassles in the previous year: Over the course of The Scapegracers and The Scratch Daughters, they went from social outcast loner to ride-or-die friendship with Jing, Daisy, and Yates, who all discovered they were also witches. Sideways recovered their specter from the witch who stole it, and rescued Shiloh, the outcast child of the local witchfinders.
Further issues occupy Sideways throughout The Feast Makers. As a human, they have to think about their mental health, decide whether to go to college or not, and cope with being flirted at. As someone who is also a witch, the sheer existence of Madeline (the thief of Sideways’s specter) is a continuing annoyance, to say the least; and as the book opens, Sideways is about to meet more witches than they’ve ever seen before – witches who don’t entirely approve of a spontaneously generated coven consisting of four adolescents. Added to this is the fact that this gathering of witches coincides with the birthday of a witchfinder’s child who accidentally died because of actions taken by Sideways and friends. Witchfinders are not ones to let such a moment pass them by.
The Feast Makers, like the previous books in the series, gives as much serious attention to the identity issues that might afflict any adolescent as it does to the more witch-specific ones. Adolescence and witchy-ness are seamlessly combined, just as they co-exist within Sideways: thinking through their preferred pronouns (or ignoring the question when it feels like too much) and figuring out new sigils for protection; confronting their crush on Jing; and learning about witch social protocol. Sideways’s thoughts ricochet like marbles from questions of college to issues of book-devils with no pause or obvious linkage, in a way that certainly felt very familiar to me.
I initially feared that this series might become a popular girls vs. smart sweet loner story, or that the adolescent social dynamics would be simplified and stereotyped. Clarke has, however, not fallen into that trap. Jing, Yates, and Daisy are certainly the popular girls – but they are not only that, and their characters have been fleshed out just like Sideways’s. All three have explored their own questions of identity, related particularly to sexuality, family dynamics, and witch-ness. As a coven, they have distinct identities as well as things that bring them together: Yates is a brilliant student (she applies to four Ivy League colleges), which is taken as seriously as Sideways’s conflict about going to college at all; Daisy is a cheerleader, and aims to be a lawyer so she can deal with scumbags; Jing reads poetry and shares books with Sideways. Together, all four of the Scapegracers party hard and use their magic to ‘Chett hex’ boys who have done girls wrong. They are stronger together than apart, while maintaining their individual identities.
The Feast Makers is riotous, raucous, and raw. It’s fast-paced – occasionally dizzyingly so – and there are a lot of feelings, which would no doubt be much to Sideways’s dismay. It’s queer, it’s funny, it’s dramatic; it wraps up a lot of the threads from the earlier books without leaving things unrealistically neat. Erewhon Books recently announced that they are publishing three new adult books from Clarke (writing as august clarke): Having seen what they’re capable of in this trilogy, I am wildly excited to see what they do next.
Alexandra Pierce reads, writes, podcasts, cooks and knits; she’s Australian and a feminist. She was a host of the Hugo Award winning podcast Galactic Suburbia for a decade; her new podcast is all about indie bookshops and is called Paper Defiance. Alex has edited two award-winning non-fiction anthologies, Letters to Tiptree and Luminscent Threads: Connections to Octavia E Butler. She reviews a wide range of books at www.randomalex.net.
This review and more like it in the July 2024 issue of Locus.
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