#Claire Legrand

[rhysknees]

What to read next

[darklinaforever]

Looking for the perfect equivalent to the Grisha trilogy ? What Darklina and Malina could have been if written well ? All with an equally bittersweet ending ?

In this case, you must absolutely read The Empirium Trilogy with the relations of Corien & Rielle (Corielle), and Rielle & Audric :

Darklina VS Corielle (by the way, if you know the names of the artists for the Darklina and Corielle fanarts, please tell me ? That I name them and above all that I go see their other creations) :

@aleksanderscult

[bigdreamsandwildthings]

It’s the simple things in life: books, iced coffee, and walks in the forest 🌲📖🖤

[haveyoureadthisqueerbook]

[harrytrumanslovenut]

StoryGraph has been a lot of fun so far and I’ve got three challenges going for 2025. I’m doing the January Pages Challenge, the Onboarding 2025 Challenge, and am going to try to read 45 books this year!

These are the books I’ve read so far and my rating for each:

•A Crown of Ivy and Glass, Claire Legrand (3.75)

•A Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness (5)

•Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness (5)

•The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon (4)

•House of Sky and Breath, Sarah J. Maas (4.75)

•The Book of Life, Deborah Harkness (5)

I’m going to try to branch out of fantasy a bit (2024 was my introduction to the genre and I ended up dubbing it my “Year of Fantasy”).

Looking for people who would want to be StoryGraph friends so I can creep their reading and get ideas and suggestions.

Hit me up on my mobile: caitlin_lewis

[nanstgeorge]

Some say the Queen was frightened in her last moments. But I like to think that she was angry.

[yabookjunkies]

Corien & Rielle || Illicit Affairs

‪𝐋𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐚𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐝𝐢𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐟𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐦𝐞‬

‪𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐚𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐦𝐞 𝐚 𝐬𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐈 𝐜𝐚𝐧’𝐭 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐤 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐞𝐥𝐬𝐞‬

[diaryoftruequotes]

We all have darkness inside us, that is what it means to be human. Claire Legrand, Furyborn

[throuple-tournament]

Image of Rielle/Audric/Ludivine found by @locksleyofrobin.

Characters Nathan/Vlad/Ursula created by @thebibliosphere.

Description provided by @powerpolyculeshowdown 's submissions.

Description provided by Anon.

[haveyoureadthisfantasybook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

[vavuska]

Books similar to The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood:

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett and Extasia by Claire Legrand are both distopyas dense of religious fanatism and women's segregation, in which sexism and sexual prejudice are associated with various aspects of religion (e.g. belief, faith, and fundamentalism). This novel shows also how higher religious fundamentalism is associated with internalized misogyny and passive acceptance of traditional gender roles, and both hostile and benevolent sexism.

In The Grace Year the stereotype of women as source of sin was laid down by the dominant religious authorities before the inception of widespread violence led by women against women, but after all the violence and blood, women learn the importance of sorority, female friendship and start to support and help each others.

The main source of conflicts are ribbons, which, in The Grace Year, are the sign of women's lifestage and the bride's ribbon is a valued price among most of the girls of the age of Tierney, the protagonist. The bride ribbons create a competition between girls to get bachelor’s attention, self-objectification, and humiliation toward each others. Although the competition eventually destroys most of them, this characteristic offers pleasure to those who survived their Grace Year. Tierney learns to survive on her own, learns that the religious values she was thought were wrong and learns also to appreciate her peer's friendship.

Extasia adds witchcraft and supernatural elements, but the main character (Amity) believes deeply in social conservatism—Amity has a preference for stability, conformity and the status quo— which is often a key trait of the religious experience, but also betrays deep feeling of self-hate.

In Extasia, the very patriarchal structures that decry witchcraft – the Puritan church in which the characters lives in and escapes from, the male headship to which the community so desperately cling, the insistence, in the face of repeated violence, on the sin of her mother – are the same structures that inevitably foreclose the options of the lead character, Amity.

To this two, I will mention also The Year Of The Witching by Alexis Henderson. In this novel, Immanuelle, a young woman living in a rigid, puritanical society, discovers dark powers within herself. This book is very similar to Extasia, but not such as good: Amity character is way more believable than Immanuelle and shows way more comprehension of the injustices committed in the name of the religion. The cult in Extasia contains more original elements and believing than the one in The Year Of The Witching, which seems more a copy-paste of mormon radical close-communities, including the elements of racial prejudice. Both Immanuelle and Amity live in the disdain of their own community because of the sins committed by their mother, which were both punished for their love affairs, but when Amity is a girl-of-action and actively search for mercy and witchcraft, Immanuelle is cursed - literally - by passivity and events occurs without her active consents, including the defection of the evil antagonist. Also, female friendship doesn't take place among the main themes and the book suffer a lot of the male love-interest help.

The Grace Year by Kim Liggett

No one speaks of the grace year. It’s forbidden.

In Garner County, girls are told they have the power to lure grown men from their beds, to drive women mad with jealousy. They believe their very skin emits a powerful aphrodisiac, the potent essence of youth, of a girl on the edge of womanhood. That’s why they’re banished for their sixteenth year, to release their magic into the wild so they can return purified and ready for marriage. But not all of them will make it home alive.

Sixteen-year-old Tierney James dreams of a better life—a society that doesn’t pit friend against friend or woman against woman, but as her own grace year draws near, she quickly realizes that it’s not just the brutal elements they must fear. It’s not even the poachers in the woods, men who are waiting for a chance to grab one of the girls in order to make a fortune on the black market. Their greatest threat may very well be each other.

With sharp prose and gritty realism, The Grace Year examines the complex and sometimes twisted relationships between girls, the women they eventually become, and the difficult decisions they make in-between.

Extasia by Claire Legrand

Her name is unimportant.

All you must know is that today she will become one of the four saints of Haven. The elders will mark her and place the red hood on her head. With her sisters, she will stand against the evil power that lives beneath the black mountain--an evil which has already killed nine of her village's men.

She will tell no one of the white-eyed beasts that follow her. Or the faceless gray women tall as houses. Or the girls she saw kissing in the elm grove.

Today she will be a saint of Haven. She will rid her family of her mother's shame at last and save her people from destruction. She is not afraid. Are you?

The Year Of The Witching by Alexis Henderson

In the lands of Bethel, where the Prophet’s word is law, Immanuelle Moore’s very existence is blasphemy. Her mother’s union with an outsider of a different race cast her once-proud family into disgrace, so Immanuelle does her best to worship the Father, follow Holy Protocol, and lead a life of submission, devotion, and absolute conformity, like all the other women in the settlement. But a mishap lures her into the forbidden Darkwood surrounding Bethel, where the first prophet once chased and killed four powerful witches. Their spirits are still lurking there, and they bestow a gift on Immanuelle: the journal of her dead mother, who Immanuelle is shocked to learn once sought sanctuary in the wood. Fascinated by the secrets in the diary, Immanuelle finds herself struggling to understand how her mother could have consorted with the witches. But when she begins to learn grim truths about the Church and its history, she realizes the true threat to Bethel is its own darkness. And she starts to understand that if Bethel is to change, it must begin with her.

[darklinaforever]

The Empirium trilogy is what Grisha trilogy should have been...

[bones-clouds]

books i read in 2024:

"extasia"

claire legrand

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️, 5

genre: horror, fantasy, wlw

synopsis:

Her name is unimportant.

All you must know is that today she will become one of the four saints of Haven. The elders will mark her and place the red hood on her head. With her sisters, she will stand against the evil power that lives beneath the black mountain--an evil which has already killed nine of her village's men.

She will tell no one of the white-eyed beasts that follow her. Or the faceless gray women tall as houses. Or the girls she saw kissing in the elm grove.

Today she will be a saint of Haven. She will rid her family of her mother's shame at last and save her people from destruction. She is not afraid. Are you?

[thestrangerthings]

Fall Special Edition Reading Challenge

Whoops! I've got a big TBR problem and a chunk of that is thanks to my love for special editions. The issue? I haven't read more than half of the SE's I own, and I can't keep allowing myself to purchase more when I don't even know if I like what I have. Plus I'm beyond out of space on my shelves and I think it's about time I start unhauling what I don't like instead of excusing their existence "because they're pretty."

So for this fall/autumn season, from September through November, I'm challenging myself to finish all 19 of my currently unread SE's and decide if they stay or if they go. Technically more books I preordered have arrived since taking these photos, and there are more to be delivered this fall, but I will not be forcing myself to include them.

Have you read any of these? If so, did you enjoy them? Are there some in here you want to read, but haven't had the chance yet?

Feel free to comment or tag the SE you like best just based on looks!

[kazz-brekker]

i knowwwww that art is subjective and people can have whatever opinions on it they want but it makes me so annoyed that a lot of the negative reviews of a crown of ivy and glass by claire legrand are like "i just found the main character really unlikeable, she was so self-centered and frivolous" as if the book does not make it really clear that gemma throws herself into stuff like planning parties and having dramatic love affairs to distract herself from a chronic illness that causes her a lot of pain as well as her untreated anxiety and depression. yeah, the main character is often self-centered, she's having a physical and mental health crisis! a major part of the story is her finally accepting that she needs to seriously talk to other people about her problems and find better coping mechanisms for herself!

[shxpeshifterr]