The Scapegracers Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Q: Is the Scapegracers trilogy finished?

Yes. The Scratch Daughters followed in October 2022 and The Feast Makers concluded the trilogy in March 2024. Both sequels are rated higher on Goodreads than book one.

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A feral, funny, genuinely creepy witch-coven debut with one of the best friendship ensembles in YA sapphic fantasy, held back by a slippery plot and a prose style that some readers never settle into.

Best for: Readers who want a queer coven, a loud lesbian narrator and The Craft energy, and who care more about voice and friendship than a tidy plot or a central romance.

Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — no romance.io entry; young adult, kissing only)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.93 Goodreads average across 3,558 ratings, with a loud minority who could not follow the plot)

Tropes: Witch coven, found family, outcast-meets-popular-girls, subverted mean girls, witch hunters, sentient spellbook, lesbian protagonist, crushes over romance, horror-comedy, first book of a trilogy.

The Scapegracers by H. A. Clarke — first published as Hannah Abigail Clarke, and now also writing as August Clarke — is book one of the completed Scapegracers trilogy from Erewhon Books, a young adult paranormal fantasy with horror teeth and a comic mouth, in which Sideways Pike, the school’s resident lesbian witch and outcast, takes forty dollars from three popular girls to cast a party spell and ends up with a coven, a spellbook with opinions and people who want her power.

It holds a 3.93 average across 3,558 Goodreads ratings, earned a starred Kirkus review, and has two sequels that readers rate much higher than it — 4.44 and 4.34. That gap is the story: people who love this book really love it, and a meaningful minority bounce off the way it is told. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is The Scapegracers About?

The Scapegracers is contemporary witch fantasy that leans into horror — blood magic, a dead animal where it should not be, witch hunters — while being consistently funny about teenage life. It is shelved on Goodreads first as fantasy, then lesbian, young adult and witches, and StoryGraph readers tag it dark, adventurous and mysterious. Kirkus puts it at ages 15 to 18, which is about right: the swearing is constant and the violence is real.

Sideways Pike lacks exactly what the popular girls have in abundance — friends, belonging, anyone who does not flinch. Daisy, Jing and Yates are assumed, by Sideways and by the reader, to be the book’s mean girls, and the whole engine of the novel is that they are not. Everything is told in Sideways’s first-person voice, which is dense, slangy and profane, and that choice buys the book its personality at the cost of some clarity.

What Makes This YA Sapphic Witch Novel Work

The coven: The friendship between the four girls is the most-praised element by a distance. In the Goodreads sample, 15 or more reviewers single out the character dynamics and friendship, far ahead of anything else.
Subverting mean girls: Readers repeatedly name the reversal — popular girls who turn out to be fiercely protective rather than cruel — and Kirkus calls it out too.
Unapologetic queerness: A lesbian narrator who is already out, surrounded by queer characters, in a book that treats that as ordinary. Around ten reviewers in the sample praise the representation specifically.
Voice and atmosphere: The The Craft comparison comes up again and again, usually to say this is better. Readers who click with the prose describe it as feral, visceral and witchy.
A trilogy that improves: Books two and three are rated half a star higher, so the payoff for pushing through is documented rather than hoped for — see our YA sapphic fantasy guide for where it sits among its peers.

Book Synopsis

Sideways Pike has made peace with being the weird girl. She does magic, everyone knows she does magic, and that knowledge mostly keeps people at arm’s length. So when three of the most popular girls at school — Daisy, Jing and Yates — offer her forty dollars to perform a spell at their Halloween party, she assumes it is a joke at her expense and shows up anyway.

The spell works. Not in the harmless, party-trick way anyone expected, but loudly, strangely and in front of witnesses. In the aftermath, the three girls do not drop her. They keep coming back, and Sideways, who has no practice at being wanted, finds herself pulled into late nights, shared secrets and a growing sense that the four of them together can do things none of them could manage alone. A spellbook that seems to have a will of its own becomes part of the equation, and so does the question of who else in town knows what these girls can do.

Because people do know. There are boys at school who have made the girls’ lives miserable, and a coven with real power is suddenly in a position to answer back. There is also a girl named Madeline, who catches Sideways’s attention and does not quite add up. And beyond the school, there are people who hunt witches and have their own plans for what a new coven’s magic is worth. Sideways has finally found somewhere she belongs, and the open question is whether she can hold onto it — or whether being powerful is exactly what will cost her.

My Review

The coven is the reason to read this, and it is excellent. Clarke takes the most familiar set-up in teen fiction — outsider meets popular girls — and refuses the cruelty the reader is braced for. Daisy, Jing and Yates are brash, strange and loyal, and watching Sideways learn that they mean it is the emotional core of the book. The friendship reads as teenage in the right way: intense, possessive, a little ridiculous and entirely sincere.

The second strength is tone. This is a horror-comedy that actually manages both halves: the magic is bodily and unnerving, the threat from the witch hunters is real, and Sideways’s narration is funny about all of it. Her queerness is not a subplot or a lesson — it is simply who is telling the story, and readers notice and value that. Kirkus starred it for much the same reasons, praising the dialogue and the camaraderie.

Where it struggles is plot and clarity, and this is the dominant complaint rather than my own gripe. In the Goodreads sample, nine reviewers call the plot weak, wandering or confusing, and it is the most common thread in the one- and two-star reviews. Six say the prose takes real adjustment — dense, slangy, overwritten in places — and one describes rereading sentences to parse them. Several readers say it takes 50 to 100 pages before the story has momentum, and a handful flag long scenes that do not move anything. The worldbuilding around the hunters and the magic is under-explained, which compounds the confusion.

One expectation to reset: the YA sapphic fantasy lists that recommend it can make it sound like a sapphic romance. It is not. Sideways has crushes and a few dates, but book one never builds a romantic arc, and a small number of low-star reviewers call the romance forced or barely present. If a love story is what drew you, calibrate; if you wanted a lesbian heroine without a romance plot eating the book, relax.

My honest note: A five-star coven inside a three-star plot, carried by voice and friendship. If you need a clean, legible story, the first hundred pages may lose you. If you can ride the voice, the trilogy gets better from here.

Element	In The Scapegracers
Central relationship	Sideways Pike & her coven — Daisy, Jing and Yates; friendship first, crushes rather than a romance
Core tropes	Witch coven, found family, subverted mean girls, witch hunters, sentient spellbook, horror-comedy
Setting	A contemporary high school and the town around it
Heat level	1/5 — young adult, kissing only
Series	Scapegracers book 1 of 3 — trilogy complete; book one ends on a hook into book two
Content notes	Constant profanity, blood and violence, blood magic, bullying and harassment by boys at school, animal death, kidnapping peril

How Spicy Is The Scapegracers?

A 1/5. I could not find a romance.io entry for it, which is expected for a young adult horror-comedy that is not being catalogued as romance at all. Kirkus places it at ages 15 to 18, and reader reports match that: Sideways has attractions and some dates, a few kisses happen, and nothing goes further. Readers who wanted more romantic content say so in the reviews; nobody describes anything on the page beyond kissing.

The thing worth flagging in advance is not heat but intensity. The violence, blood and swearing are the reasons for the 15+ band, not sex. If you want another low-heat witch book with a lesbian lead, These Witches Don’t Burn sits at the same 1/5, and Camp Damascus is an adult queer horror novel at the same level.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want friendship at the centre of the story, you love a loud and profane first-person narrator, you like your witch fantasy with horror and blood in it, and you are happy for romance to stay on the edges.

You may want to skip it if: you need a clear, fast-moving plot from page one, dense slangy prose wears you out, you want your fantasy to explain its rules, or you came for a sapphic love story and will feel short-changed by crushes.

In short: the best coven in YA sapphic fantasy, delivered in a voice you will either adore or fight for 400 pages.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

This is not a book riding a new wave. It came out in September 2020 and has gathered 3,558 Goodreads ratings and more than 900 written reviews since, which is steady rather than explosive. Its discourse lives mostly on Goodreads, and the reason it still finds readers is structural: the trilogy finished in March 2024 with The Feast Makers, so new readers can now binge all three, and it keeps turning up on YA sapphic and witchy-read lists. There is also a full audiobook series narrated by Eileen Stevens; book one runs 10 hours 41 minutes, released in October 2020, though I found no reviewer commenting on the narration either way.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The coven, first and most consistently. The friendship between Sideways, Daisy, Jing and Yates dominates the positive reviews, and “found family” and the mean-girl reversal come up repeatedly. The Craft is the recurring comparison, usually as a compliment to this book. The representation is the next most-named strength — an out lesbian narrator in a cast that is queer by default. Then the voice: readers call it feral, fierce and atmospheric, and several compare the prose to Maggie Stiefvater’s. Notably, even some of the people who struggled with the prose concede it becomes rewarding once you adjust, which tells you the writing complaint is partly about taste.

What readers argue about and complain about: Plot, above everything. The most common charge in the low-star reviews is that the story is thin, meandering or hard to follow — subplots that go nowhere, scenes that do not advance anything, and a threat that is never fully explained. The prose is the second theme: dense and highly stylised, with dialogue and slang that some readers find unconvincing, and a first stretch that several say took 50 to 100 pages to settle into. Third: characterisation. A handful of readers say that for a character-driven book, the characters beyond Sideways stay flat. Beyond that, the romance: three or four readers call it forced or underdeveloped, and one argues the representation is more label than substance. That last view is very much a minority; far more readers praise the queerness as the point.

The series question everyone should ask first: the trilogy is finished, which makes this easy. Book one closes its main conflict but ends on a hook that sends you straight into book two — readers call it a cliffhanger, though Lex Kent’s word for it is “palatable.” The Scratch Daughters (October 2022) is rated 4.44 across about 990 ratings, and readers say it ends happily with room for more. The Feast Makers (March 2024) is the conclusion, rated 4.34; some readers found its climax rushed, but it wraps the story, and the romance that book one only hints at finally lands there. If you liked book one at all, the sequels are the reason to keep going.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Scapegracers a romance?

No. It is a witch-coven horror-comedy where friendship is the main relationship. Sideways has crushes and a few dates in book one, but no romantic arc develops until later in the trilogy.

Does The Scapegracers end on a cliffhanger?

Partly. The main conflict of book one resolves, but it ends on a hook into book two that many readers call a cliffhanger. The trilogy is complete, so you can go straight on.

Is the Scapegracers trilogy finished?

Yes. The Scratch Daughters followed in October 2022 and The Feast Makers concluded the trilogy in March 2024. Both sequels are rated higher on Goodreads than book one.

What age is The Scapegracers for?

Older teens and up. Kirkus lists it for ages 15 to 18, and the constant swearing, blood magic and violence match that band rather than younger YA.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes. It is narrated by Eileen Stevens and runs 10 hours 41 minutes, and she narrates the whole trilogy.

Who is H. A. Clarke?

The same author as Hannah Abigail Clarke, the name on the first edition. The trilogy is now listed as H. A. Clarke, and the author’s newest book, The Felicity Complex, is published as August Clarke.

If You Loved The Scapegracers, Read These Next

The closest match on premise is These Witches Don’t Burn, another out lesbian witch in a contemporary town — softer, more mystery than horror, and readers often compare the two. If the horror edge and the queer found family are what grabbed you, Camp Damascus goes darker with an adult lesbian lead. And if you want YA sapphic fantasy where the romance is the point, Crier’s War puts the relationship front and centre.

For more, browse our full YA sapphic fantasy books list or the complete Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

The Scapegracers wants to be the queer witch-coven book that The Craft never was, and in the ways that matter most, it is. The coven is warm and ferocious, Sideways is a genuinely memorable narrator, and the horror-comedy tone holds together. It is also confusing in stretches, slow to find its plot, and light on romance for anyone who arrived expecting one. Whether it works for you depends on whether voice can carry you through a muddled story — and the readers it does carry tend to finish the whole trilogy and rate the later books higher. Check The Scapegracers on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Scapegracers ranks as a voice-first YA sapphic witch horror-comedy — superb on friendship and attitude, held back by a slippery plot, and best approached for the coven rather than the romance.