“Ghosts come in fog, the villagers have always said.”

The Blue Maiden was a very different book, between reality and visions. Walking on a tight rope, it interrogates us on our humanity, our bestiality, our relationship with Nature and the World. After a heavy and long prologue, the use of present tense doesn’t dynamise the story. On the contrary, it suspends the action, freezing it in place in a blurry incertitude. It adds tension.
We can’t say what is true, what is from the sisters’ imagination, if they invent it, if Bea has visions or if we are trapped in a magical –or cursed– world. That’s the beauty of this book, we glide in that uncertainty, wave in the melancholy created by the flawless writing, making us sure that bad things are coming, ready to knock at the door.
Who is the crazy one here? Who acts good? Who misbehaves? We never know as religion and naturalism contront in turn, then wave with each other.
None of the characters are black, or white, they are all subtle shades of grey, and the author leaves to us the task to taste, think, judge, and choose. The magnificent descriptions of Nature are a counterpart to the Human’s craziness, and also contribute to freeze the story. In this regards (and –of course– because the sisterhood links), it reminded me a bit of The Virgin Suicides, where beauty announces the darkness to come. It’s a beautiful reflexion about Humans, Nature, and Bestiality, about what it means and feels to grow up, to become an adult and find yourself.
If you look for an escape through Fantasy and a magical world, this probably isn’t the right book. On the other hand, if you want to live an experience (I don’t have a better world), to feel that island, to get lost and wander in a fog full of discoveries, then plough into this short read. I loved that strange but fascinating immersion.
Rate 4.5/5

Thank you NetGalley, Anna Noyes and Atlantic Press for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

"From the author of Indie Next Pick and New York Times Editors' Choice Goodnight, Beautiful Women comes a transportive and chilling debut novel of two sisters growing up on an isolated Northern European island in the shadow of their late mother and the Devil.

It's 1825, four generations after Berggrund Island's women stood accused of witchcraft under the eye of their priest, now long dead. In his place is Pastor Silas, a widower with two wild young daughters, Beata and Ulrika. The sisters are outcasts: imaginative, oppositional, increasingly obsessed with the lore and legend of the island's dark past and their absent mother, whom their father refuses to speak of.

As the girls come of age, and the strictures of the community shift but never wane, their rebellions twist and sharpen. Ever capable Ulrika shoulders the burden of keeping house, while Bea, alone with unsettling visions and impulses, hungers for companionship and attention. When an enigmatic outsider arrives at their door, his presence threatens their family bond and unearths - piece by piece - a buried history to shocking ends. All the while Berggrund's neighboring island The Blue Maiden beckons, storied home of the Witches' Sabbath and Satan's realm, its misted shore veiling truths the sisters have spent their lives searching for.

A Nordic Gothic laced with the horrors of life in a patriarchy both hostile to and reliant on its women, The Blue Maiden is a starkly beautiful depiction of lost lineage and resilience."

Nordic Gothic, yes please!

I wanted witches! Where are the witches?! What a disappointment. I struggled all the way through this only to be let down once again at that terrible ending.

Anna Noyes’s The Blue Maiden is a strange book, about a strange pair of sisters. Before we meet the Silasdottir sisters, Noyes shows us the darkest chapter in the history of Berggrund Island. In 1675, a priest manufactured a witch hunt, leading to the death of dozens of women. One of the few survivors only avoided being murdered because she was pregnant. Her descendant is Silas, the father of Ulrika and Beata Silasdottir.

The extended prologue casts a sinister atmosphere over the rest of the novel, set in the 1820s. Ulrika and Beata are odd. Even if they weren’t the daughters of the island’s priest, they still wouldn’t fit in. They love to roam the island and create their own elaborate games. They also pester their neglectful father for any information about their mother, who died giving birth to Beata. Their few attempts to interact with the other children on the island go awry, much to Bea’s disappointment.

The Blue Maiden follows Bea, for the most part, from when she was a young child to her first years as wife to an islander who left for the mainland for years before returning. As Ulrika grows less willing to conform to convention—especially after a head injury—Bea longs for a more normal life. Except Bea’s reputation is tainted not only by her heritage, but also by her desperate longing to be loved. I saw Beata pushed and pulled by expectation and desire and deep uncertainty about who she really is.

This book leaves a lot of gaps for the reader’s imagination to speculate about the characters’ motivations and goals. Until a few key pieces of information are revealed late in the novel, it feels like a lot of the characters are acting purely on instinct or just in reaction to what is done to them. One of the few things that is clear in The Blue Maiden are the plants that cover the island, which Ulrika, her friend the healer Bruna, and their female ancestors used to heal the islanders or to work magic (maybe) out of the sight of the church. The names of the plant names and their uses hint at a long, self-sufficient culture that I wish I could know more about. Readers who don’t like a spare, almost fairy-tale-like style of writing will be frustrated. Readers who like to let their imaginations loose on subtext, however, will have a blast.

Fascinating story of an isolated, tightly structured people and their intense need to identify and punish those they consider witches. Did accusations and confessions come from young people only because they were convinced of what they saw, or was it all real? I fell deeply into the gripping tale of two sisters who experience the bullying and the unnerving potentially true (or not) coming accusation that they were somehow “marked” by the Devil, who is awaiting them in a horrifying place, the family and all who know them shudder in fear and intense dread. I read this novel in a remarkably short time as each trouble kept me in the world Noyes created.

Wow! This book is steeped in incredible atmosphere … I was transported to a tiny island off the coast of Finland, 1825, and felt, smelled, and tasted every inch of it:

In silty stretches of loam, purple orchids shiver, their blossoms like tongues.

Blue dust covers every surface. Her mouth is packed with wool and gnats sip at her eyes.

… the farmhouse seems possessed by Ulrika, daises shivering in their vase when she props her elbows on the table, chairs creaking, ceilings lowering, grease from her lips printed on the rim of each glass.

The author did an incredible job of keeping the reader off-kilter, making us wonder how reliable – and how emotionally stable – our narrator, Beata, really was. The sentence structure, the observations – I’m not sure I can even explain the genius of the way this is written.

Will you be confused by parts of it? Probably. But I think that’s part of the experience … feeling Beata’s confusion as she wrestles with an unknown past, an absent mother, and a father so mired in religion, he is fanatical (and to me, he felt precipitously close to repeating the same warped beliefs about women that led to the murder of half the island's females years earlier, based on accusations of witchcraft).

I was going to give this a 4 for the somewhat abrupt ending, and the open-endedness of it, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot, marveling at it, and decided the ending was, again, nothing short of brilliant. The story begs the question: where do we draw the line between fable and fate, story and life, the real and the imagined, and possibly between sanity and madness?

For readers who like to dig deep, there is much to unearth in this novel, thematically and even emotionally. It is a story of motherless daughters and an island so filled with life and female inequity… For readers who like a straightforward story with a standard three-acts and obvious plot, this one may not be for you. However, I wouldn’t let that stop you from reading. It’s only 240 pages and certainly worth a try. You might surprise yourself and be swept away by the mystery of this book.

I want to pull out my shovel and excavate all the hidden meanings and nuance of this incredible literary book!

Unfortunately for me this one wasn’t quite what i expected and I was fairly disappointed. It wasn’t that it was a bad read, because it was ok but it definitely wasn’t what i hoped for after reading the blurb for the novel! It was hard to follow and quite slow at times!

While I enjoyed this read I think it was a right book wrong time situation and I feel like I can’t give the best review off of that but I still recommend giving this book a read

I went into the book with good intentions, especially considering the book description. I felt as if I wer missing something, or perhaps many areas of the book I just couldn't understand. I want to that both Anna Noyes, and Groves Press for the opportunity the read this book.

I was very interested in the promising synopsis but I did not enjoy how it was written or the pace of the story. I was expecting a different story and lost throughout.

I couldn’t get into this book. The synopsis sounding promising, but the way it was written didn’t flow well and didn’t grab my attention.

There is something very special about this book. It was a little bit different than what I’m used too. But, I really enjoyed reading it so much. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to step out of their comfort zone.
10/10

We start out in 1675, when on Berggrund Island, Sweden, 32 women were killed as witches and burned once their bodies dried out. We then go to 1825 and follow two sisters, Bea and Ulrika, who were the daughters of the local priest, and their mother died in Bea's childbirth. It goes on from there, to when they are young and then when they become marriageable. Including all the things that girls do when they are young. What the Blue Maiden is, is an Island called Blockula that in 1675 that the women were told to have brought children too which was made into a wives tail. We follow Bea as she becomes marriageable to August, and how when her father died her sister Ulrika came and took care of her when she finally got pregnant with her son, Auggie. It goes through many scenario's telling what happens to the two girls and how their live change.

Vivid imagery that reminds me of the witch movie, one thing I really look for in books is stylistic prose and it was a big hit in this one for me. The way the author whose name i’m now gonna have to learn crafted a dark archaic world immersed me a lot.

This book has such a solid premise. It has witches and witch trials in an atmospheric, isolated location. What's not to love?

Unfortunately for me, this book simply didn't work for me. The plot is choppy - we get such short snippets of everyone's lives and are basically guessing or making up what's happening in between. I don't know what I was supposed to take away from this novel. There are uncomfortable themes around incest, every man seemed to want both sisters, and the ending was too vague to wrap anything up with a bow.

A huge thank you to the author and the publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.

This didn’t quite do it for me unfortunately. I enjoy stories with more of a plot. Some of the time jumps seemed a little rushed. The cover is absolutely beautiful though!!

The imagery evoked by the writing was absolutely beautiful. I couldn't quite define what specific parts did so, but I could definitely imagine this isolated island and all the cloying socials mores that come along with it. However, that being said, I was quite confused as to how the burning of the witches in the previous centuries translated to the Bea and Ulrike's stories. I understand that they were descendants of the one women that was saved from burning simply because she was pregnant, but the description of the book made it seem that they had somehow inherited that stigma from her or that they continued in that vein. What I saw in the beginning was an over-zealous minister who decided he was going to get rid of the women he saw as vile, even though there were really no murmurings of witchcraft prior. The girls (Bea and Ulrike) just happened to be the descendant of a woman that managed to escape the fire and became social outcasts for it. There were hints of the unknown with the island and such, but it was vague and ill-defined. Bruna seemed like the village wise-woman that helped Ulrike with the red book but that's about it. It was more about family secrets, lost love, and regret more than anything else.

This was a great book! I could not put it down. It flowed really well and was full of emotion. Anna Noyes wrote these characters in a way that you had so much empathy for them.

Absolutely gorgeous storytelling from Anna Noyes in The Blue Maiden wasn’t a surprise: what caught me off guard was the sustained emotional impact of the writing. It’s rare that someone who writes such clean, crisp short stories as Noyes can sustain a novel with the same neatness, but The Blue Maiden is intricate without feeling weighty or slow and Noyes gives us beautiful evocative prose from beginning to end.
The Blue Maiden is a coming of age story that gives us entry to a small community in early nineteenth century Northern Europe: its historical fiction that doesn’t feel historical, and the cast of characters is interesting in the same way that the denizens of a locked-room mystery are.
The story - and ultimately it feels like a story of time and place as much as the story of sisters Beata and Ulrika - has a tesseract quality to it, and as I read I found myself stopping and thinking about particular sentences without feeling disrupted from the experience of reading.
The plot owes much to Gothic predecessors: Hawthorne, du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Wharton all come to mind. Noyes sustains feelings of apprehension and uncertainty at the same time that she shows the reader a community that is oddly inveigling.
Avoiding spoilers is hard when a book is this well-made; there is a powerful reveal that may catch some readers off guard, but I found the small brutal pinches of family and community history were far more integral to the overall impact.
This book is unusual, sharp as a scalpel, and at times a little coy: altogether it is one of the most immersive novels I’ve read in ages. I haven’t read anything since Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites that made me feel quite so envious of the author’s skill, and I look forward to what she will do next.

I received an advance copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Well, this… wasn’t quite what it says on the tin.

The blurb of Noyes' debut novel caught my eye enough to request an advanced copy - with mentions of witch hunts, the devil, buried history, the patriarchy, isolation, mystery, Gothic horror… but little of that felt of much relevance in the way I expected.

The story opens in the past, as all but a handful of the women in an isolated Northern European island are accused of dancing with the Devil in The Blue Maiden, a neighboring island, and assassinated.

Several generations later, we follow sisters Ulrika and Beata as they grow up with their father, a widower and the community’s Pastor, trying to discover who their mother (an outsider in the island) was and who they could be, living with the stigma of Otherness.

This was a beautifully told story, full of rich, atmospheric descriptions, with a dream-like quality and interesting main characters that we follow as they grow up and their bonds and their place in the world are tested.

Unfortunately, for me, there wasn’t much connection with the history of the wrongfully accused women or the mystery of The Blue Maiden. They existed as a vague threat, neither part of a supernatural horror plot nor directly connected to the sisters in the present. It felt more like a character study than anything else, so if you like that kind of stuff, you might enjoy it. Ultimately, it wasn’t a bad read, but I was expecting a different kind of story.