I’ll tell you one thing about contemporary American high-school or high-school adjacent stories: I find the social dynamics baffling. Even the healthiest ones seen to have a solid underlay of oneupmanship and bullying predation, and in general, they seem pervaded by an air of casual, normalised cruelty that—for all the awkwardness and social isolation of my own school years—strikes me as alien. There’s something vicious about the American high-school story, and it’s present in far too many portrayals for there not to be a core of truth behind it. The Scapegracers is Hannah Abigail Clarke’s debut novel. It shares the background of casual cruelty of most American high-school stories, although its focus is on sudden, unanticipated friendship and the brutality, loyalty, kindness, cruelty, cleverness, and power of adolescent girls than on school