Home » Archive by category "Uncategorized" (Page 145)

Book Review: The Graces by Laure Eve

The Graces by Laure Eve ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Amulet Books, 2016

ISBN-13 : 978-1419721236

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

The narrator of The Graces is new to town, and ready to shed her old identity, including her name. The centers of attention at her school are the Graces, seventeen-year-old twins Thalia and Fenrin, and their younger sister, Summer. The Grace family has been entwined in the town’s history for generations, and there are rumors of witchcraft that surround them. They are a close-knit family that rarely let anyone into their circle, but, renaming herself River, she finds herself welcomed in. River herself is very closed off and rarely volunteers information about her life or family– she is always thinking about whether she has said or done the “right thing” to be accepted by the Graces, who she believes have a magical key to helping her solve her problems.

River, Summer, and a group of girls from school attempt to cast a love spell, which River secretly focuses on Fenrin. Developing a close friendship with Summer, who is her own age, River also attempts to create situations that will give her and Fenrin the opportunity for close contact, but these are always interrupted, and finally end in tragedy.

It’s easy to read the first part of this book and see the narrator as merely anxious, needy, and maybe a little manipulative, a wishful thinker swept up by a glamorous and mysterious family. The second part gives us a look under the surface of it all, and there’s where it starts getting disturbing, as there are some very unsettling powers that come to the fore.

There is a lot of suspension of disbelief required to buy into this book, but Eve keeps things erratic enough, with her unreliable narrator, and enough gaps between the real and unreal to keep a reader going. A couple of things are real flaws, though. The book uses a trope I loathe, of the “always absent but overprotective parents,” and the plot had some big holes in it that made the actions of certain characters very confusing, and led to an ending that was only partly satisfactory (there is a sequel, so hopefully some of that will be resolved in it). None of the characters are especially likable, but there’s enough intrigue and “fairy tale” atmosphere to appeal to a certain kind of teenage girl. Recommended.

Posted on September 22, 2020 by Kirsten, Reply

Book Review: 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 Kirsten, 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.