Necrology
The Dirty #1
In Meg Ripley’s subversive, thrilling novel Necrology, a wise girl raised on the wonders of the wilds is forced to contend with those who would see her kind extinguished.
In an alternate version of America, magic pulses through the population, wielded either by Dirty women who are forbidden from practicing it or by Freeman, who sit in seats of power and loathe what the Dirty represent. An old truce between the group frays when a Freeman leader, coveting a woman he cannot have, is violent and receives violence in return. Eight-year-old Rabbit is at the center of the turmoil that ensues: the adopted daughter of Whitetail, who swallowed her vicious sister to delay war, she is encouraged to denounce Whitetail and the Dirty in public, ensuring the elder’s execution.
Taken from her forest home to an industrialized city, Rabbit proves a challenge to her captors. Though she witnessed Whitetail commit an unforgivable act, she maintains her belief in the goodness of the Dirty magic that formed her. Men may want to reshape the world in their image, but she resists being their tool, knowing that “if you don’t believe there is good in magic, power in women’s own decisions, then you will never see the future that should be.”
Necrology is a life-giving novel that employs its own intoxicating vocabulary, embracing the dual meanings of words like “dirty,” which men use as an aspersion and which women claim with pride. Its mythology includes the necrology, a stone that contains the history of Dirty women; summonings of twin incarnations and the specters of the dead; and behind it all, the wild, which endows those who honor it with magic. The first book in a series, its gripping ending fires the first supernatural shot in a war to come—one that will determine whether women will be free.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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