Charis welcomes The Scapegracers author Hannah Abigail Clarke for a conversation with Tor editor, Christina Orlando.

Rich with the urgency of feral youth, The Scapegracers explores growing up and complex female friendship with all the rage of a teenage girl. It subverts the trope of competitive mean girls and instead portrays a mercilessly supportive clique of diverse and vivid characters. It is an atmospheric, voice-driven novel of the occult, and the first of a three-book series.

Skulking near the bottom of West High’s social pyramid, Sideways Pike lurks under the bleachers doing magic tricks for Coke bottles. As a witch, lesbian, and lifelong outsider, she’s had a hard time making friends. But when the three most popular girls pay her $40 to cast a spell at their Halloween party, Sideways gets swept into a new clique. The unholy trinity are dangerous angels, sugar-coated rattlesnakes, and now–unbelievably–Sideways’ best friends.

Together, the four bond to form a ferocious and powerful coven. They plan parties, cast curses on dudebros, try to find Sideways a girlfriend, and elude the fundamentalist witch hunters hellbent on stealing their magic. But for Sideways, the hardest part is the whole ‘having friends’ thing. Who knew that balancing human interaction with supernatural peril could be so complicated?

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Hannah Abigail Clarke (he/she/they) is here and queer, etc. They have been published in PRISM international, Portland Review, and Eidolon. They were a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult Fiction and a Pushcart nominee. They currently research queerness, labor, and monstrosity in grad school. The Scapegracers is their first novel.

Christina Orlando (they/them) is the Books Editor & Publicity Coordinator for Tor.com, where they get to be a book nerd all day. As a freelance writer covering poetry, gender, and sexuality, their work has appeared in Electric Literature, Catapult, gal-dem, THEM, Adroit Journal, and Book Riot. They are a 2019 recipient of Spotify’s Sound Up grant for people of color in podcasting. They currently reside in Brooklyn, NY but would like you to pretend that says Provençe, France for the sake of maintaining their allure.

CELEBRATING TEEN LESBIAN WITCHES IN THE SCAPEGRACERS WITH HANNAH ABIGAIL CLARKE AND CHRISTINA ORLANDO