Book Club

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me" C.s. Lewis

For our December bookclub meeting, we read The Mercies, by Kiran Millwood Hargrove.

The story opens on Christmas Eve, 1617, in the coastal village of Vardo, in Finnmark, Norway. A freak winter storm has blown up over the sea, and killed all the men in the village while they are fishing. The remaining women of the town must fend for themselves, and for three years, they struggle to feed themselves, and to heat their huts in the brutal, rainy cold. But they succeed.

Then, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornett comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. In this village, he sees a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty evil. His young wife, Ursa, arrives with him, and sees the power of independent women living without the help of men. She befriends Maren Bergensdatter and they are drawn together in ways that surprise them both, as the island begins to close in on them with an iron grip. The story is inspired by real events, including the freak storm and subsequent witchcraft trials in 1620.

Luckily, our meeting was a cozy affair and nothing like the winter storm described in the novel! We are a small group of readers these days, but we have a varied slate of books that cover all genres, and we love to meet and discuss them on the first Thursday evening of each month. We meet at 7:30pm, either in a member’s home or on Zoom, Covid regulations permitting. For this holiday meeting, we each brought a wrapped book to share in a white elephant book exchange. Host Jillian Huang’s cat Nico stood guard over the presents until it was time to swap them!

AWA Book Groups meet once a month on various days and times. Go to the Book Groups page of the AWA website to register for one that suits your schedule. Happy reading!

The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave