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Book Review: The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

cover for The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave  (  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Little, Brown, and Company, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0316529259

Available: Hardcover, CD,  Audible audiobook, Kindle edition

 

Sometimes there is a very fine line between historical fiction and horror, and that is the case with Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies, a story more chilling than the remote fishing village where it takes place. In 1617, a freak storm at sea killed nearly every man in the village, leaving the women, mostly widows, to take on many of the men’s previous roles, such as fishing, to prevent their starvation and ensure their survival during a long, cold season where the ground was so frozen they couldn’t even dig graves for their husbands. When a commissioner chosen for his skill as a witch hunter arrived, he was assigned to root out the indigenous people, the Sami, who the Christian governor, or lensmann, believed were sorcerers. However, his attempts to govern the women in the village were not entirely successful, and the women who refused to give up their independence were accused and convicted of causing the storm that killed their husbands through witchcraft, then burned.

Past the initial horrific event of the storm, this is a compelling story of women trying to stay alive and survive their grief, most working together even when there are divisions due to personality and beliefs. Those divisions become a chasm too far to cross when a minister, and then the commissioner, arrive to re-establish cultural and religious norms.

Maren, a capable young woman navigating the increasing conflict between her mother and her Sami sister-in-law, and Ursa, the commissioner’s timid, young wife, are the point of view characters, and their awkward relationship is important to both the plot and character development. Ursa is in the difficult position of wanting to belong and help the women who have been helping her, especially Maren, while her husband is tearing the community apart, Maren and Ursa have developed affection for each other, despite Ursa’s complicity in her husband’s horrifying persecution and execution of .Maren’s friend Kirsten and Maren herself. The hysterical accusation and brutal descriptions of torture and execution, as brief as they are, is unbelievably difficult to read as we see and feel it through Ursa’s and Maren’s individual experiences. The description of the village women encouraging a woman about to burn to breathe in the smoke so she’ll suffocate to death before she burns is heartbreaking.

According to Hargrave, historically. fifty-two women were convicted and burned to death in these witch trials. Today women may not be facing accusations of illegally using witchcraft to maliciously attack the men in control, but the sense of dread I felt in reading The Mercies suggests that there is an agenda out there premised on controlling women’s actions, thoughts, and feelings, hasn’t gone away.

 

Contains: sexual assault, torture, violence, domestic abuse, murder, miscarriage, sexual situations, references to genocide, graphic descriptions of public execution.

Posted on September 19, 2020 by , Reply

Anniversary Musings

In a lot of ways today is a very sad day for me. My husband, Dylan, who some of you may have known, died on April 17, 2014. Today is our wedding anniversary, a day for looking back and remembering.

As a children’s librarian and school media specialist I always was passionate about reading engagement, and frustrated by the librarians around me who put it down (and I was on an awards committee, believe me, I have experienced that disdain) but it was Dylan, always a horror fanatic, who was most dismayed when he discovered during the internship for his MLS that the only horror writers most public librarians knew were Stephen King, Anne Rice, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Dean Koontz, and that’s all they cared to know. There was almost no reader’s advisory or collection development material out there (with a very few exceptions, notably Becky Siegel Spratford’s reader’s advisory guide) and the lack of librarians’ interest in horror fiction was, he felt, going to lead to a lost generation of readers who could have been engaged through exposure to horror fiction. Anecdotally, I knew a guy in college who read nothing and had no interest in it until he was exposed to Stephen King. But there is so much more to the horror genre than Stephen King.

Dylan founded Monster Librarian, a review site he created to help ameliorate this problem before blogs were a thing and when frames on websites were part of a solid design strategy in building a website. It is a project that has grown up with our first child, who was three months old when the first review went up and is now a freshman in high school.

Horror’s reputation has changed over time as millenials, who grew up reading Goosebumps and similar series,  watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and appreciating the darkness and supernatural aspects in Harry Potter, grew up loving this stuff. 20 years after Goosebumps, they were introducing these books to their kids. And after massive debates over technology in publishing, it is a lot easier and less expensive (kinda, publishers suck when it comes to libraries and ebooks) to potentially expose horror to a larger market, especially with transmedia platforms for popular properties (such as The Walking Dead). I wish Dylan could have seen this explosion, but he’s not here, and there are a lot of other amazing blogs and review sites that have flourished. He would have loved to see this, that we aren’t the only ones out there now, that libraries and librarians are taking the genre seriously, and that readers have so many choices available.

I have said it before but the site makes almost no money– not enough to have paid anything out in years. We are an all-volunteer site and it’s really necessary that we be able to cover hosting fees and postage. Together, that adds up to about $200 a year. Right now we are still looking at having to raise $195. We are an affiliate of Bookshop.com as well as Amazon, and can also take contributions through Paypal from that red “Contribute” button. I hope you will be willing to help us keep going with what is truly, especially for me, a labor of love.

Posted on September 16, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: Killing November by Adriana Mather

cover of Killing November by Adriana Mather

Killing November by Adriana Mather (  Bookshop.org | Amazon.com  )

Ember, 2020

ISBN-13 : 978-0525579113

Available: Library binding, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook.

 

November Adley was told she was being sent to boarding school for her own safety, but on her arrival, she discovers it is full of intrigues she knows nothing about but is expected to rise to the challenge and survive deceptions, strategies, and attempts on her life from both students and teachers. The classes are like nothing she’s ever had to take before: knife throwing, poisons, deception, and tree climbing, among others. Deadly midnight challenges lead to shifting allegiances, every word and action has the potential to put her life at risk… and, while everyone assumes she knows exactly what’s going on, she has no idea why her father would send her to this school (I also question why her father would send her to a school filled with enemies she knows nothing about for safety. It would be a spoiler to reveal what she has in common with the other students, and that doesn’t make me question his judgment less).

November does have some survival skills she learned from her parents, mostly as games: she’s not unfamiliar with knife-throwing or tree climbing, she is good at observation and memorization, and she’s learned to think outside the box (her parents have kept a LOT of family secrets, and uncovering these is essential to her understanding of events and relationships at the school). But she has never learned to disguise her emotions or hide the truth, a disadvantage in the dangerous games of the school. She has to earn the trust of her prickly roommate, Layla, and decide whether she can trust Layla’s brother Ashai, an expert in deception, to survive.

Killing November rockets along from start to finish, and even the most unbelievable aspects of the story get caught up in the rush. It is the first in a series, and with November scrambling to figure out what’s going on, whose loyalties she can depend on, and who she is supposed to be, trapped in the claustrophobic boarding school environment, it is a really fun read. With much of this settled in the second book, while there’s still plenty of action, it’s less engaging. Both Killing November and its sequel, Hunting November, are enjoyable thrillers that have the potential to appeal to teen lovers of action, murder, mystery, and romance. Recommended.

 

 

Posted on September 14, 2020 by , Reply
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