Genres: Fantasy, Contemporary or Urban Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Butch lesbian nonbinary MC, major bisexual Asian-American character, major queer Black character, major sapphic femme character, NB/F, background M/M, assorted queer and BIPOC and QBIPOC minor characters
PoV: 1st-person, past-tense
Published on: 26th March 2024
ISBN: 1645660826
Goodreads
The Craft for Gen Z: in the The Feast Makers, indie bestselling author H. A. Clarke crafts an action-packed conclusion to the Scapegracers trilogy, as our beloved teen coven tackle college acceptances, queer romance, and a witch trial to remember for the ages.
After restoring their powers, Sideways just wants to get on with senior year. But the covens have convened for the trial of Madeline Kline. When this stubborn, independent witch begs the Scapegracers to save her from a cruel and unusual punishment, Sideways knows they have to get involved. It’s the right thing to do, even if Madeline did steal their soul and wear it for a time. Right?
Making an example out of Madeline seems, strangely, just as important to the most powerful covens as divvying up the Scapegracers amongst themselves. Sideways, Jing, Daisy, and Yates are reluctant to abandon what they’ve built together, but as the college acceptances (and rejections) roll in, the offer of a magical family beyond Sycamore Gorge becomes increasingly tempting.
Unfortunately, choosing a new coven will have to wait: witchfinders are gathering in town, and some of these visitors make the Chantrys seem tame in comparison. Every witch—Scapegracer or not—is about to be in grave danger.
And on top of all that, Sideways thinks they just might be in love.
In H. A. Clarke’s signature raw and explosive style, The Feast Makers brings the indie-bestselling Scapegracers trilogy to a dynamic end as Sideways, Jing, Daisy, Yates, and Shiloh tackle college acceptances, queer romance, and the meaning of justice in an ever-challenging world.
I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~remember those who came before
~but feel free to argue with the those who are here now
~illusions that show the truth
~transformative justice
~never underestimate queer youth
~always carry a Polly Pocket
~the witchfinders have no idea what they’re up against
My review of book one, The Scapegracers
My review of book two, The Scratch Daughters
:this review contains spoilers for the rest of the trilogy!:
This is not a book. It’s a war-cry and an anthem, a manifesto and a dream, maenadic euphoria and anarchist fury. It’s starfire and glowsticks, weaponised Polly Pockets bedecked and befanged with neon and vegan leather. It’s the mystery that makes the chants of protesters and the chants of witches the same thing, and packs the punch of both; it’s a relief and release and rejuvenation; it’s a fuck off and fuck no and fuck YES.
It’s a baby book devil, waiting to be born, to become your spellbook, to see you and love you and teach you how to play cat’s cradle with the stars, unleash hurricanes with your rage, stop bullets with a kiss.
We started the ritual with Scapegracers, scribed the sigils and seized hold of our souls in Scratch Daughters. Now The Feast Makers is here, it’s time to unleash the fucking magic.
Embrace it, let go, and CAST.
*
I finished Scratch Daughters with no idea what Clarke was going to do with book three, no clue how the trilogy could wrap up with an ending that would satisfy me. Besides all the immediate plot facing the Scapegracers coven, there were some pretty Big Deal reveals about the world of witchcraft and witchfinders and how both are inextricably tied to the patriarchy! How could Clarke fix that with just one more book??? I loved and believed in Sideways and their girls, damn right I did (and do) but – but – surely that was too much even for them, with just one more book to go?
Surely?
Yeah, no. I should never have doubted. Every question is answered, every plotline resolved, every character given the ending they earned and deserve. Every byssus thread spun in the earlier books is remembered, gathered up, and woven together into the most sharply scintillating tapestry, embroidered in Clarke’s lightning-lipped prose. The Feast Makers is everything I dreamed of packed with everything I didn’t know to want, the absolutely perfect ending to a perfect trilogy.
I CANNOT EVEN.
I felt seven emotions at once and acknowledged none of them.
Like, literally cannot: I’ve spent weeks tearing myself apart trying to figure out how to review this book. Trying to figure out what I can possibly say that will do it justice, give you even the slightest idea of how EVERYTHING the Feast Makers is. Have you wondered about the title? Here, I can make it real simple: THE BOOK IS THE FEAST, MOST DECADENT AND DIVINE.
(The Scapegracers are the feast.)
(The witchfinders are the feast.)
(My heart is the fucking feast, devoured right out of my chest by Sideways and Jing and Daisy and Yates, by Mr Scratch and Shiloh, by motherfucking Madeline, what even is this, making me give a fuck about Madeline is enough to prove magic exists, prove Feast Makers is one giant spell that Clarke has cast on me personally, because literally nothing else can explain how much I ached over that trainwreck-gorgon of a girl in this grand finale.)
Where do I even start? What should I tell you? That Feast Makers is every bit as glorious and messy and sharp and brutal and breathtaking as the books before it? That this is a love story, with candy-heart necklaces and nuclear reactors and Marks of Cain? That it’s a justice story, a cementing-your-place story, a never-back-down story? That I laughed so hard I cried, repeatedly; that I bit my lips to bleeding at the Feels; that I had pissed-off cobras in my stomach every time Sideways and their girls were in trouble? Which they were WAY TOO OFTEN, I am too young to have a heart attack, for the love of the gods go easier on me, Clarke.
(Don’t you dare go easier on me.)
finally, I was being beheld by people who knew what they were looking at.
This is the book where the Scapegracers finally get to meet other covens, and I could write an entire thesis about how the witch community is a metaphor for (or maybe just straight-up is) The Left, in all their varying factions, takes, approaches to magic and each other and willingness to walk the walk they talk. How easily they’re led – despite being as impossible to herd as cats – and how quickly (some of them) flee from confrontation. They’re ready to do terrible things to Madeline, as punishment for the terrible things she’s done, and yeah I get that’s how we do it in the real world, but the real world is fucked and also, you have magic, you don’t have to be this way, you shouldn’t be this way, you’re supposed to be better. It’s punitive justice versus transformative justice and rebellion within anarchy, and Clarke is definitely Saying Things but also I felt every second of it in my gut, in my chest, terrified and outraged and so fucking proud of how the Scapegracers dug their heels in and bared their teeth and said no.
Where’s the guy?
inside already
Is he cool?
hes a vegan trotskyist
Does that mean yes or no
bite me
The trial is only one part of what’s going on in this book, and I don’t want to tell you the rest, because it’s so much better when you don’t see it coming. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Clarke writes such genuine, authentic teenagers, ones who are ridiculous and passionate and complicated and so very, painfully real. They are powerful witches who are still terrified by the end of high school, out to right the world’s wrongs and fumbling through falling in love, so ready to die for each other they forget about their own safety, and yes, that last one goes triple for Sideways, of course it does, have you not been paying attention???
Yates nodded gravely. She pressed her hands to the table, and with the poise of some Homer singing an epic that would determine the course of history forever, Yates explained to us what the matter was with her choir of kpop boys.
And so much of it hits so hard not just because Clarke clearly remembers what being a teenager feels like, but because it’s conveyed through prose that is itself magic, simultaneously poetic and candid, full of obscure mythological/occult/religious references and similes that paint such a clear picture of what it’s like inside Sideways’ head. You know this is a kid who has read widely and weirdly, who has been raised by spellbooks and two utterly epic and eccentric dads; Clarke never has to tell you outright because it’s all there in Sideways’ own inner monologue. You’re not told it, you inhale it, absorb it without even realising. You know who Sideways is right down to the gnawed knuckles, and if asked you can’t even explain how you know, but you do. It continues to be one of the best storytelling-through-character I’ve ever seen.
Spindly terrible staircase. It looked like a nephil’s spine.
I mean – A NEPHIL’S SPINE!!! That is so unbelievably cool. Where else are you going to hear a simile like that?!
Nowhere else, is where.
This series has always been so fundamentally queer, and I don’t just mean because it has queer MCs. It’s the prose, all glitter and guts and gramarye, lines that describe a staircase as a nephil’s spine. It’s the actual story Clarke’s telling, colouring outside the lines, gone aslant from the perspectives we’re used to, queer as in strange and queer as in fuck you, disregarding the norm to create something numinous, liminal, raw, glittering, savage. This is not simply queer fantasy; it is fantasy, queered. Made other; made ours.
I need you to understand that.
You can see it in the Scapegracers themselves, Sideways-Jing-Daisy-Yates, how intrinsic their queerness is to their story. Their evolution, their becoming, is perhaps not done – they are only teenagers, after all, they have a long time to keep growing and keep becoming – but it is such a fundamental part of the trilogy. Scapegracers was them finding each other and facing what they were and wanted to be, in terms of queerness as much as magic; Scratch Daughters was about legacy, discovering and claiming and connecting with the queers and witches and queer witches that came before them, that were and are their predecessors, their ancestors, their kin and kind. Feast Makers, then, is about stepping up and joining that community, the community as it is now; seeing its beauty and its flaws, celebrating the one and doing your best to refuse and repair the other; not so much finding your place as making your place within that community.
And meeting those who would destroy you and yours head-on.
(The way in which they do that ties right back to the first book, to an act that came out of desperate hurt and rejection and became kindness and love and family, and no one else would think of it, it could only ever have been Sideways and their girls, and it is as poignant as it is LEGENDARY.)
I was plunged in opalescent milk. I had red gills. I did not drown.
This is a feast that Clarke has laid out before us, decadent and delicious and full of everything you’ve ever needed, everything you’ve ever craved, satisfying the hungers you did and the hungers you did not know you had. These books will never be too much; one cannot overeat at this table, just as no one will be turned away. This is a feast where all are welcome and all are sated, and when it is over, you will leave elated, enchanted, extravagantly joyful.
Because yes, feasts must end. But this is one you can always come back to. The doors will always be open; the Scapegracers will always be waiting. That is the only reason I can bear for these books to be over – they will never be over. There will never be anything stopping me from coming back.
I leave elated, enchanted, extravagantly joyful. And irrevocably transformed for the better, a little bit wilder and a little bit better at seeing the wonder all around me. In love with words again, inspired by seeing just how electric and eccentric and exquisite prose can be. My throat tight with the spectre forming there, and the eagerness to use it.
Goodbye, Sideways. Thank you. I’ll be back to see you again.
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