Friday Friyay: 'The Mercies' by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

 Happy Friday and, more importantly, Happy New Year! I hope 2022 will be a kinder year, in many ways, and that it will be equally full of amazing books and moments of joy for all of you! Before I get soppy or start complaining about how time keeps going faster as I get older, let's get onto the book I'm eyeing as my first read for 2021: The Mercies by Kiran Millgrove Hargrave.

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Bergensdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Northern town of Vardø must fend for themselves.

Three years later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband's authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty evil.

As Maren and Ursa are pushed together and are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them with Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence.

Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1620 witch trials, The Mercies is a feminist story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization.

Book Beginnings is at home on Rose City Reader, hosted by Gilion Dumas, and Friday 56 at Freda's Voice, hosted by Freda. I'll also be joining the Book Blogger Hop, hosted by Billy over at Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer.

BB:

'Last night Maren dreamt a whale beached itself on the rocks outside her house.
    She climbed down the cliff to its heaving body and rested her eye against its eye, wrapper her arms across the great stinking swell. There was nothing she could do for it but this,' p.5

I loved this opening so I quoted it a bit more extensively. It really reminded me of Whalerider, a stunning film from New Zealand that I highly recommend. It is tragic, but it is also beautiful. I'm also pretty sure that dreaming of a beached whale is probably a bad omen.

F56:

'Her sister is still child-thin, child-straight at the waist and hips though Ursa was nearly full-figured by thirteen. The doctors, who come monthly, measure her each time, but none see her naked as Ursa does, the sharp planer of her body hollowed, her bad leg shrivelled off as old fruit.' p.56

Quite a harsh passage but I thought it really showed the relationship between Ursa and Agnette, one of care and dependency, but also love. I'm excited to reach this point in the book and learn more about them.

BBH:

The last BBH of the year is from Billy at Coffee Addicted Writer himself:

What bookish things did you receive for Christmas?

I actually had to put something of a moratorium on people buying me books because I'm drastically running out of space to put them. While I love having books all around, I do also want them at least a little bit organised, so I know what is where. So I didn't actually receive a whole lot of bookish things for Christmas, except for How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You, the cartoon. My dad sent me the second one a while back, and because I enjoyed it so much he sent me this one as well. I do love having a cartoon to occasionally leaf through.

So that's it for me, that's it for 2021!