#Kiran Millwood Hargrave

[cutiee-blo]

Millwood

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Mercies | Author: Kiran Millwood Hargrave | Publisher: Picador (2021)

[daphneblakess]

books i read in 2024: the dance tree by kiran millwood hargrave

"why do you think those women dance? because there is no earthly way to be saved. you and Mutter have told me enough times - Strasbourg is sliding hellwards. and we women, we bear the brunt. we are bred or banished, and always, always damned. prayers cannot help us, the priests will not help us. your babies were never blessed, so they were damned. it is not right. that is the unnatural act, not this."

[the-lady-writes-what]

A very long time ago, I received a lovely DM from @marziemoo when they asked about what are some recommendations for wlw/sapphic books about or written by authors of color. I apologize that it has taken me so long.

Allow me first to give some caveats:

I am very, very, very white. I am NOT a person of color. Please take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I take FOREVER to read books so, the ones I have read is small list but I have included ones that I researched and ones that have been on my To Read List for a while.

I tend to read mostly fantasy, so this list will comprise mostly of fantasy because that is what I read. I'll try to diversify with other genres. Everything except "The Jasmine Throne" I have not yet read.

Tasha Suri is a South Asian author whose work "The Jasmine Throne" depicts the story of an imprisoned princess and a priestess who hides from her past. It's passionate and powerful.

Warning: this book does depict or implicate harsher subjects and themes such as sexism, human sacrifice, and contains violence.

Kalynn Bayron, a black author. "Cinderella is Dead" tells the story of Sophia, who is forced with other girls to be forced into marriage two hundred years after Cinderella and her tale died. Sophia is joined with Constance, the last descendent of Cinderella and her step-sisters, to bring down the king. I haven't read this one yet, but it sits on my giant pile of To Read stack

This book by Leah Johnson tells the story of Liz Lighty, a midwest black girl. She's hoping to find financial aid so she can attend the college of her dreams. In order to do that, she has to become prom queen. Along comes Mack, the new girl, who is also vying for the prom queen crown. Sounds like rivals-to-lovers to me? I don't really read contemporary fiction, but the story premise is cute.

In Chinelo Okparanta's book, Ijeoma grows up as her nation gains independence and by the time she's 11, civil war breaks out. Ijeoma is sent away to safety where she comes across another displaced child. Friendship blooms and becomes a star-crossed romance. Again, I don't read a lot of contemporary fiction, but I might had this one to my reading list myself.

With the world's survival at stake, two teenagers are selected to journey to the Fairy Queen to fix it. Kaede and Taisin are drawn together during the mission. As members of their party succumb to unearthly attacks and fairy tricks, the two come to rely on each other and even begin to fall in love. This is a prequel to Malinda Lo's series, Ash.

Originally published in 1995, LarissaLai weaves a story in and out of medieval China to contemporary Vancouver. The book follows a thousand year old fox spirit, a 9th century Taoist poet and nun, and a young Asian-American named Artemis.

Makeda Hicks just lost her job and girlfriend in one fell swoop. She doesn't want to hear stories from her grandmother about her whirlwind affairs with royals and agents. So when Beznaria Chetchevaliere crashes into her life, Makeda can't resist. Only one bed and fake marriage hijinks insues!

Lei, in Natasha Ngan's book, Girls of Paper and Fire, lives with her father years after her mother is taken by the royal guards and disappeared. Now, they've come for Lei, whose rumored beauty has intrigued the king. Lei enters the opulent yet oppressive palace to train with eight other young women to please the king. A forbidden romance begins with Lei and she begins to question how far she would go for revenge.

In Tehlor Kay Mejia's premiere novel, 'We Set the Dark on Fire,' writes a compelling story that mirrors real world issues of immigration and equality. Daniela Vargas is the top student at Medio School for Girls. As a top student, upon graduation her paths are limited, run a husband's household or raise his children. Will Daniela chose the life of privilege her parents fought for or will she join the resistance to bring true freedom to Medio, and perhaps forbidden love?

Seventeen year old Lil and her twin sister, Kizzy are captured and taken away from their traveler community. Forced to work in the kitchens, Lil is drawn to another slave, Mira. Lil and the others discover and fight for a fate of their own making. (Through some research, I discovered that the author, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, is of Indian descent through her mother and lives in Oxford.)

Yetu remembers everything. She remembers the people who came before her, the pregnant African women thrown overboard by their enslavers. In order to escape this burden and the memories, Yetu travels to the surface to discover her past and a future for her people.

Manuela Azul lives a confined life in a small Florida apartment hiding from both her father's crime family in Argentina and ICE. On the run, she discovers a world within our own and one which Manuela discovers something about herself that could rock her world.

This Hugo award-winning novel by S.L. Huang, is a retelling of the Western fairy tale classic, Little Red Riding Hood. Only this time, Red Riding Hood is done with wolves and forests. Combing fairy tale nostalgia and Chinese folklore, the main characters, Rosa, Red Riding Hood, and Hou Yi the Archer join forces and set forth on a quest to stop the deadly sunbirds from destroying everything they hold dear.

[forasecondtherewedwon]

"I believe we will find each other again. And we will travel on."

The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

[shxpeshifterr]

[gennsoup]

Grief cannot feed you, though it fills you.

Kiran Millwood Hargrave, The Mercies

[bones-clouds]

books i read in 2024:

"the deathless girls"

kiran millwood hargrave

rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

genre: vampire, fantasy, historical, ya, wlw

synopsis:

They say the thirst of blood is like a madness - they must sate it. Even with their own kin.

On the eve of her divining, the day she'll discover her fate, seventeen-year-old Lil and her twin sister Kizzy are captured and enslaved by the cruel Boyar Valcar, taken far away from their beloved traveller community.

Forced to work in the harsh and unwelcoming castle kitchens, Lil is comforted when she meets Mira, a fellow slave who she feels drawn to in a way she doesn't understand. But she also learns about the Dragon, a mysterious and terrifying figure of myth and legend who takes girls as gifts.

They may not have had their divining day, but the girls will still discover their fate...

[good-books-to-read]

Travel Destination: Norway

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. 20 year old Maren watches the sea and the sky break into a sudden violent storm, All forty of the village’s men were at sea, including Maren’s father and brother, and all forty are drowned in the otherworldly disaster.

For the women left behind, survival means defying the strict rules of the island. They fish, hunt, and butcher reindeer—which they never did while the men were alive. However this cannot last with the arrival of Absalom Cornet, a man sent from Scotland to root out alleged witchcraft with his pretty young wife Ursa.

The Wide Starlight by Nicole Lesperance

According to Arctic lore, if you whistle at the Northern Lights, they'll swoop down and carry you off forever. Sixteen-year-old Eline Davis knows it's true because it happened to her mother. Eli was there that night on the remote glacier in Svalbard, when her mother whistled, then vanished.

Years later, Eli is living with her father when she learns the northern lights will be visible for one night and hatches a plan to find her mother. And it works. Her mother arrives with a hazy story of where she's been all this time. Eli knows no one will believe them, so she keeps it all a secret. But when magical, dangerous things start happening, it becomes too much for Eli, pushing her mother away not expecting her to disappear as abruptly as she appeared. Her mother gone again, Eli's devastated. Until she finds the note written in mother's elegant scrawl: Find me where I left you. And so, off to Svalbard Eli goes.

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

Emily Wilde is a professor studying faeries in a remote village of Hrafnsvik to finish up her encyclopaedia, however it doesn’t go to plan with villagers vanishing, the town snubbing her and her annoying colleague Wendell Bambleby who just decided to show up and get in the way.

But as Emily gets closer and closer to uncovering the secrets of the Hidden Ones—the most elusive of all faeries—lurking in the shadowy forest outside the town, she also finds herself on the trail of another mystery: Who is Wendell Bambleby, and what does he really want?

The Reckless Kind by Carly Heath

It's 1904 on an island just west of Norway, and Asta Hedstrom doesn't want to marry her odious betrothed, Nils. But her mother believes she should be grateful for the possibility of any domestic future, given her single-sided deafness, unconventional appearance, and even stranger notions. Asta would rather spend her life performing in the village theater with her fellow outcasts: her best friend Gunnar Fuglestad and his secret boyfriend, wealthy Erlend Fournier.

Shunning marriage for good, Asta moves with Gunnar and Erlend to their secluded cabin above town. With few ties left to their families, they have one shot at gaining enough money to secure their way of life: win the village's annual horse race, if only it was that easy.

The Twisted Tree by Rachel Burge

Martha can tell things about a person just by touching their clothes, as if their emotions and memories have been absorbed into the material. It started the day she fell from the tree at her grandma's cabin and became blind in one eye.

Determined to understand her strange ability, Martha sets off to visit her grandmother, Mormor - only to discover Mormor is dead, a peculiar boy is in her cabin instead and a terrifying creature is on the loose.

[whilereadingandwalking]

Kiran Millwood Hargrave's newest historical fiction, The Dance Tree, centers on the mysterious dancing plagues that once haunted Europe, and their roots in religious mania, misogyny, homophobia, and more. At the center of our story is Lisbet, a woman who just wants a child and to take care of her bees, but who might have even the bees taken from her by a hateful man in power. When the dancing sickness falls, Lisbet finds out dark secrets about her sister-in-law, her best friend, and the people who live in the shadows of their religious world.

I really enjoyed the story of secret joys, in queerness and in quiet independence, found in Hargrave's book, and the fact that the dancing sickness remained mysterious and vibrant in the background of the narrative. It is two stories in one, and as a reader you have to trust that the two belong together: a woman damned for being queer, Lisbet being forced to mourn her many miscarriages in secret, all women who feel too much and in the wrong ways for the patriarchal system around them. While not perfect, historical fiction fans will enjoy this one about rebellion, secret love, and of course, the bees.

Content warnings for suicidal ideation, infanticide, miscarriage, racism, homophobia.

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The Haunting Season: Ghostly Tales for Long Winter Nights

By Imogen Hermes Gowar, Bridget Collins, Natasha Pulley, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Elizabeth Macneal, Laura Purcell, Andrew Michael Hurley, and Jess Kidd.

[sweettoothnerd]

It’s hard, isn’t it? Describing a person in only words, when they can hold whole worlds in them.

[spoondrifts]

formulating a more complex and in-depth review of the mercies by kiran millwood hargrave but all i have to say right now is that i was deeply drawn in by the physicality of this book. the people, the landscape, the weather: all of it is intrinsically connected to the body and the sensory experience of living in a body. the scenes where people touch one another are so vivid that it feels like they're touching you. christianity play a massive role in this book, but the mcs feel so disconnected from it that we do too, absorbed in the physical encounters between people and their environment so that we are fully distanced from the spiritual but not the abusive people perpetuating it. the weather and the sea act as autonomous beings that can touch and strike and hurt and feed. having a body becomes an intentional and raw act of connection

[libraryleopard]

Adult historical fiction novel set in 17th-century Norway inspired by the real history of the Vardø witch hunts

After a sudden storm claims the lives of most of the men in the remote fishing village of Vardø, the surviving women take it into their own hands to survive

nfortunately, the storm is far from the final tragedy to strike Vardø, as a new preacher is sent to the village to put the fear of god in its inhabitants, stirring religious fervor to a boiling point

Explores religious persecution, anti-indigenous prejudice, and the brutality of the natural world

Sapphic main characters, F/F romance, Sámi side character

[mmepastel]

Gros coup de cœur pour ce roman qui date de 2020 et que j’avais raté, alors qu’il a quand même été dans la short list du Prix Femina.

L’autrice est extrêmement jeune mais diablement talentueuse.

Elle s’est inspirée d’une histoire (hélas) vraie. Au début du XVIIe siècle, dans le nord de la Norvège, sur une petite île éloignée de tout, Vardø, une tempête terrible s’est abattue alors même que presque la totalité des hommes du village avait pris la mer. Tous meurent. Les femmes, stupéfaites, dévastées, les mères, les épouses, les promises, toutes se retrouvent veuves, orphelines. Elles doivent peu à peu surmonter la douleur et s’organiser. Mais un autre fléau ne tarde pas à pointer son nez. Un pasteur pâle est dépêché sur l’île pour assurer la survie du village, alors que ce qui leur manque est clairement de quoi manger, de quoi se chauffer… et il est bientôt suivi par un délégué de l’église luthérienne, en pleine expansion, qui a fait étape en Norvège pour prendre femme (pauvre Ursula qui quitte sa famille sans se douter avec qui elle va désormais partager sa couche).

Progressivement on assiste dans la communauté à la division des femmes qui avaient déjà peine à s’unir en raison de désaccords liés au culte religieux (dans cette région, les Samis se sont fait rares, mais quelques uns sont là, dédaigneusement appelés Lapons, et ils ou elles ont imprégné les lieux de leurs pratiques évidemment contraires au dogme chrétien). Le délégué du roi de la Norvège se donne comme mission d’éradiquer la sorcellerie et le démon sur l’île. Sa femme, bien innocente au début, tente de s’entendre avec les femmes du village, mais doit bien vite se contenter de l’amitié de Maren, femme sombre et torturée qui se prend d’affection pour elle, et lutter contre le dégoût et la peur que lui inspire son mari, à la fois pieux, rigide, zélé et cruel.

On sent que tout cela finira mal. Plusieurs femmes sont dénoncées par les pieuses acquises à la foi luthériennes, et malgré les efforts de Maren et d’Ursula, de plus en plus proches, l’étau se resserre. Le sort réservé aux supposées sorcières est atroce.

La lecture de ce récit est très forte. On est vraiment plongé dans l’atmosphère angoissante de cette traque permanente, on ressent la dureté de la vie, en ces temps, sur ces lieux précis, pour des femmes. Leur solitude. L’indifférence qu’elles inspirent aux hommes, qui les considèrent comme des demis personnes, utiles pour assouvir leurs désirs tout au plus. Les souffrances de Maren et celles d’Ursula sont parfois dures à supporter. J’ai parfois pensé à The Handmaid’s Tale : l’obscurantisme guidant des mains de tortionnaires…

C’est très bien écrit, la psychologie des personnages est très cohérente, assez poussée. On frémit devant ces destins brisés, on admire le courage de certaines, on s’arrache les cheveux d’impuissance. On espère l’amour, on le touche du doigt, mais l’île devient piège…

Un roman très puissant, écrit d’une main d’acier dans un gant de velours…

[bookcoversonly]

Title: A Secret of Birds & Bone | Author: Kiran Millwood Hargrave | Publisher: Chicken House (2021)