Hargrave penned a real event where all the men are killed off by page one. I appreciated Hargrave’s choices even if they were not historically supported or comfortable for the modern reader.Īs many of the other works in the historical fiction genre of the past five years, The Mercies focuses on the marginalized, female voice. Hargrave commemorates the life of the women from Vardø so readers are upturned by their deaths. Yet, she adamantly states this was her intent in her author’s notes. Hargrave did flourish in her creative liberties a bit with the plot. In contrast, the events described in the text were sounding boards only to contextualize these humans’ experiences. What struck me most of all was how desperate Maren, the main narrator, felt all her life. I felt the pain of loss deeply while reading The Mercies. Hargrave writes the expression of grief like poetry and the sense of longing like epic stanzas. I have not read a novel this tragic in some time. I wrote it to examine how they lived, to explore their lives, loves, and friendships in this remote place.” In Hargrave’s own comments to Powell’s Book Blog, “But the way they died was not why I wrote The Mercies. Maren and Ursa’s friendship feels like the only sanity amidst the hysteria set on by the community’s grief. It does not take long, after the empty roles of the lost men are filled by new men, women’s names are whispered by the accusing few. She knows the fate of witches and that it is her husband’s sole job to find them. Ursa, the commissioner’s new wife, is afraid every moment of her days. She observed the deadly aftermath of the storm with her prophesy secreted away in her heart.

Maren, the protagonist, is without a betrothed, father, and brother. It was Hargrave’s intent to write into the echoing void and let the women’s voices cry out their struggles. The storm of 1617 wiped out half the population of Vardø, Finnmark (modern day northeast Norway), yet not much is recorded of the personal details of the surviving women. Based on true events of a historic storm and proceeding witch hunt by the “Christian” king, The Mercies is a historical fiction book by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

The mercies novel