School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-Seventeen-year-old Minnow Bly is sentenced to juvenile detention for brutally assaulting a mentally disturbed man. Only 12 hours prior, her entire community had been burned to the ground and the Prophet, the leader of the cult to which her family belonged, had been murdered. Now an FBI investigator makes her a deal. He's wants the truth in exchange for recommendation for parole. Minnow's life has been built on lies: the lies of the Prophet, the lies of her father, and the lies she's told herself. As she works with the investigator, Minnow relives the events leading up to the murder: her forbidden friendship with a young biracial man outside of the cult, her disturbing arranged marriage with the Prophet, and the fateful day the Prophet commanded her father to cut off her hands with an axe as punishment for running away. Brutal and raw from the opening words, Minnow's story will take hold of listeners and grip them hard, not letting them go even after the story ends. Narration by Morgan Hallett is crisp and on point. VERDICT High school students who like their realistic fiction gritty and disturbing will love this extraordinary first novel.-Lisa Hubler, Charles F. Brush High School, Lyndhurst, OH © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
A harrowing opening scene immerses readers in 17-year-old narrator Minnow's trauma, as she responds to a perceived threat with astonishing brutality, while carrying the skeletal remains of her own amputated hands. Minnow was five when her parents followed Prophet Kevin into the wilderness to found a rustic commune of Kevinians, who worship the God Charlie and obey prophesies divinely dictated to Kevin, such as, "It is my Commandment that ye do again this task, with Minnow, daughter of Samuel, for she be in need of spiritual intervention of the kind that marriage provides." The narrative weaves between the hellish prison of the past that Minnow longed to escape and the juvenile prison she enters, which becomes an unexpected haven where she learns to read, make friends, and "think about the universe, and the earth, and the stars." As Minnow recounts both shocking cruelty and acts of kindness-most movingly from her one friend outside the commune, the boy she assaulted, and her "lifer" cellmate-suspense, dread, and hope intermingle in Oakes's charged, page-turning debut. Ages 14-up. Agent: Jennifer Laughran, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. (June)' © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Minnow Bly--a former member of a cult whose hands were amputated as a horrific punishment--is alone in the city. A physical confrontation lands her in a juvenile detention center; suspected of having information about the cult leader's murder, she unveils her story of life under the Prophet's rule. Visceral and frightening, Minnow's story is a fast-paced and absorbing bildungsroman mystery. (c) Copyright 2015. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A girl who has just escaped a destructive cult after her hands were cut off lives in juvenile detention, found guilty of assault, a crime she indeed did commit. Minnow was taken at a young age to live with her family in an extreme cult called the Community. The Prophet rules through fear, inflicting sadistic punishments for any infraction, including chopping off Minnow's hands. Girls are kept illiterate, and polygyny is the order of the day. (Manufactured whole cloth by the Prophet, their religion has nothing to do with Christianity.) In the woods, she meets Jude, to whom she is drawn even though he is an outsider and forbidden. Jude tries to teach her to read, but he too has been kept in ignorance. While in juvenile detention, however, her savvy cellmate, Angel, introduces her to the world of science. Minnow learns to read and discovers that, although she believes she'll be sent to the adult prison when she turns 18, she would like to learn much more. Oakes uses flashbacks to slowly unveil the major plothow Minnow lost her hands and the aftermathas she follows Minnow's life in prison. The absurdity and cruelty of the cult and its Prophet also slowly come to light, all occurring as Minnow herself begins to find her own way. Dark and not just a little sensational but hugely involving nevertheless. (Fiction. 12-18) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Traditional fairy tales include many disturbing, violent stories, but their sharp edges are often softened by magic, timely rescues, and the prevailing power of virtue over evil. Many YA authors rework those stories to remind us of their inherent darkness. Setting real-world trauma next to the gentler fairy-tale version simultaneously makes the trauma easier to bear while calling attention to the grimness of those stories, particularly regarding the casual cruelty against young women that often gets taken for granted. Stephanie Oakes' chilling debut novel takes that tactic one step further by bringing a particularly brutal tale, The Handless Maiden, to concrete, harrowing life; stripping it of its symbolism; and giving a powerfully realistic voice to its main character. When Oakes introduces Minnow for the first time, the 17-year-old handless girl is standing over the bloodied body of a young man mere hours after escaping the smoldering wreckage of the compound where she lived in the mountains. She's quickly picked up by the police and soon convicted of aggravated assault and sent to a juvenile-detention center. Once she's in prison, an FBI psychologist encourages Minnow to reveal what happened to her, and her story unfolds in a disaffected, yet bone-chillingly beautiful, first-person narrative. Minnow has spent 12 of her 17 years living with the Kevinians, a fanatical doomsday cult in the Montana mountains that follows the teachings of their prophet, Kevin. He demands unquestioning loyalty, which is not a good match for clever, curious Minnow, who, in spite of her skepticism and Kevin's harsh punishments for disobedience, is enchanted by his teachings and wants to find comfort in faith. But her disillusionment with Kevin comes to a horrific end when he announces that he intends to marry Minnow against her will. She attempts to escape but is caught. Outraged by her willfulness, Kevin commands her own father to cut off her hands with a hatchet. What the Brothers Grimm gloss over in The Handless Maiden, Oakes focuses on with almost surgical vividness: nerves severed, shuddering bones, the smell of blood. But Oakes explores far more than just the realism of the heinous punishment as, in stunningly spare and gorgeous language, Minnow speaks grimly yet eloquently of the aftermath. With simmering fury and sharp gallows humor, she reveals her bitterness and the shattered state of her faith and trust in the universe, but her frosty tone occasionally breaks to let out a glimmer of resonant shock, pain, and fear. All of these roil about as she comes to terms with her brutal mutilation and ponders the possible future. Minnow's experience includes vestiges of fairy-tale details that hint at Oakes' source material, but the heart of her story the loss of agency at the hands of a power-hungry man is all too familiar, and Oakes brings that element home by populating Minnow's detention center with young girls who have been punished for fighting back. Many deserve to be there, maybe even Minnow, but justice is a murky concept for these appropriately angry young women, and Oakes subtly comments on the way attitudes about what girls deserve and what they are expected to endure arise, at least partially, from folktales, mythology, and biblical texts. Kevin's damaging prophesies are so unhinged from reality that it's easy to see how poisonous they are, but what about stories of witches, princesses, or even God? Are some of those stories any different from those written by a delusional man drunk on power? In Oakes' nuanced and haunting narrative, however, those questions become more ruminative than purely critical. For all her anger and bitterness, Minnow never becomes completely cynical, because life in prison is ironically freeing, and the solidarity she finds among other young women miraculously gives her a sense of empowerment and hope. But the magic of Minnow's tale isn't in the power of virtue, an omnipotent God, or justice; in fact, those things prove to have little power at all. Rather, it's in her determination to thrive in the face of shocking trauma and betrayal by choosing to value genuine kindness and her own deep well of inner strength.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist