The Feast Makers

H A Clarke
Completed 7/5/2025, Reviewed 7/5/2025
3 stars

I really dislike reading latter parts of a series.  This book was nominated for a 2025 Lodestar Award, which is a non-Hugo YA award voted on by the Hugo voters (I know).  I only have 18 days left to read the remaining nominees in the categories I want to vote for, so I didn’t read the first two in this series.  This book is the conclusion of the Scapegracers trilogy.  It was a tough getting into it, since all the character development and world building had already been done.  I did catch on eventually, but found myself feeling rather indifferent to it.

It begins with Sideways, a non-binary lesbian teen and their small coven of three other teen girls, the Scapegracers.  They are going to a gathering of covens where a witch named Madeline will be dealt with for stealing souls and killing witches.  Madeline begs the Scapegracers for help and they do the right thing.  However, this is just a prelude to a larger plot by the witch finders to destroy as many witches as they can.  The Scapegracers just want to finish senior year of high school and Sideways just wants to figure out if they are falling in love.  But they all have pivotal roles in the unfolding events around them.

My biggest problem with the book was that it was written from Sideways’ first person POV.  While I usually enjoy this perspective, I found being in their head too crazy.  The whole book is written like the mind of a complex, high energy, obsessive teen.  The prose goes on and on and on.  I found it hard to focus and eventually tiring.  I’m sure this is like the mind of a teenager and I am probably too old to remember the tornados of my brain at that age.  Reading it, however, wore me out.  I felt like a good editor could have pared this down by about a hundred pages and still have had the impact it was intended to have.  If I had more time to read the whole series, I probably would have hated it by this volume, assuming the whole series was written this way.

On the positive side, it’s a very empowering story of a group of high school seniors making an impact on their community of covens as well as the community-at-large and their high school.  While the general feel of the four is that they are a bit on the juvenile delinquent side, they know to do the right thing when it’s necessary.  And this whole book is about choosing the right thing, even when it might mean death by witch finders.  

One thing I didn’t get is that Sideways didn’t seem to have much magical ability.  Not having read the first two books, I don’t know what their story is and why the other girls are more advanced in their magic.  Their best asset was that they were a headstrong butch lesbian, willing to take on anyone or anything to protect their coven, family, and friends.  Their worst asset was the constant storm of overthinking that went on in their head, as evidenced by the run-on prose.  

I thought the book worked overall.  It had its intended impact, and it was great to see a strong non-binary lesbian and cis girls.  The end was exciting, although there was an issue with a magicked marble that Sideways forgot about, but I had it in the forefront of my mind the entire book.  I thought it was rather sloppy execution.  I really like the book demons and would have liked them to be more in the forefront.  Perhaps they were in the earlier books.  I give this book three stars out of five.  It’s decent, just not great.  This is the first of the YA books nominated for the Lodestar, so we’ll see how it holds up compared to the other four.