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Book Review: The Graces by Laure Eve

cover for 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 , Reply

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

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth illustrated by Sara Lautman

Cover of Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth illustrated by Sara Lautman

William Morrow & Company, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-0062942852

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audibook, audio CD ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

 

 

Emily M. Danforth, author of the YA novel The Miseducation of Cameron Post, stretches her boundaries in this unsettling, haunted novel that reveals a buried history of queer romance and horror and some seriously creepy hornets.

The story moves smoothly from events in 1902 that led to the deaths of three students at the Brookhants School for Girs, tied to an uninhibited and shocking memoir by openly bisexual feminist Mary McLane, to a present day where author Merritt Emmons has written a book about the deaths that is about to be made into a sapphic “Blair Witch” style horror movie.

Two of the girls who died were co-founders of a club called The Plain Bad Heroines, which admires Mary’s unapologetic attitude, are found dead in the woods with a copy of the book,  attacked by a swarm of hornets in an orchard of rotting fruit. The third acquires it after their deaths and is literally poisoned by reading it near a plant in the campus greenhouse where she is caretaker. The headmistress confiscates it, convinced that it is cursed. As the students abandon the school, both the headmistress and her relationships begin to disintegrate, and trapped almost alone in a snowstorm, it’s hard to tell how much of a grip on reality she has left.  She’s also left remembering her college days, where a love affair led to her eventual inheritance of Brookhants, chosen by her husband because of its reputation as a spiritually important location, in a very strange manner.

The horror movie based on Merritt’s book will star the popular actress Harper Harper and the less well-known actress Audrey Wood. Merritt initially is starstruck by Harper and they hit it off; her interactions with Audrey are more negative. The movie will be filmed at the actual Brookhants School and on the grounds, adding atmospheric creepiness.  Once the filming starts, it seems nothing can go right– it’s almost like the production is cursed. This leaves Harper, Audrey, and Merritt, a lot of time for exploration on the Brookhants estate. Black apples, rotting vegetation, and ominous swarms of hornets in the woods ratchet up the tension, and eventually the story behind the Brookhants curse is revealed.

This is a doorstop of a book. After its tense begining, it slows down for some time and, had I not known there would be a payoff, I might have set it down. I think a large chunk of the Hollywood segment could have been easily eliminated  to slim it down. This is where a lot of the present day characters’ personalities are established, and Merritt’s romantic interests start to develop, but it is just too drawn out.

Danforth isn’t subtle about centering lesbian and bisexual characters. It is even a point of contention in the casting of the movie, where Merritt objects to Audrey playing a lesbian role, assuming she must be straight, to have Audrey come out and say she’s bisexual. The headmistress’ memories of inheriting the school are all related to the romantic love she and her partner had for each other. even as she turns on her.

Plain Bad Heroines is also about as metafictional as you can get; it’s a fictional story inspired by a book by a real person, containing illustrations and images of what I’m pretty sure are news articles about the book, that a fictional author has written a fictional nonfiction book about, that is being made into a fictional movie being filmed found-footage style, as if it is nonfiction. Both the director and Harper Harper use social media to affect the narrative, so Harper’s Instagram posts document the movie shoot and all of its “cursed” problems for her followers, creating a Blair Witch effect of convincing the audience for the movie that the haunting is real. Even the people around Audrey and Merritt are in on the gaslighting, so that none of them know whether they can trust each other or reality. It’s clever, and the unreliability of the people around them and the way the reader knows the three women are being manipulated is distracting, but it doesn’t detract from the sense of atmospheric creepiness, dread, and tension, with hornets and rotting vegetation always around. You will never feel the same about hornets after reading this book.

Danforth actually has an author’s note where she discusses her discovery of Mary Maclane in researching hidden sapphic history, and that she wanted to bring that to light through Plain Bad Heroines. I never had heard of her and I found this fascinating. Unlike The Miseducation of Cameron Post this is not a YA novel, although it might be appreciated by some older YA readers, but certainly it is an original book with plenty of dread and some well-drawn lesbian and bisexual characters that will draw in readers of historical and metafictional horror, Hollywood, and haunted houses. It won’t be for everyone, but this book will certainly find its audience. Recommended.

 

Contains: violence, murder, body horror, sexual situations, insects

Posted on August 10, 2020 by , Reply
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