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All reviews and opinions are solely my own.

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Book List of Witches, Magic, and Superstitions


Welcome.
I am finally getting into the Fall season. I wasn't quite ready to welcome all the changes last week.
I was clinging to the last bits of summer. Trying to wrap up all the tasks I was working on. Which included cleaning up my Goodreads account. I had a few books I wanted to put into new categories and ended up making a new "shelf".
I realized I had a few that really didn't fit anywhere, except plain old fiction or my "read" books.
I decided to add a "witches" category/shelf.
I thought, now is the perfect time to share that list here with all of you.
I'm not into gore or horror so much, but I am intrigued by old time witchcraft. As in healers and using mother nature instead of modern day, first world medicines. I also love anything about superstitions, rituals, old wives tales. The sort that make you question what could be. What you've heard or been taught. Maybe even a little chill up your spine. 
Those things, to me are what make a book more of storytelling. A good old fashioned..."Grandma used to say..." kind of story.
If those are the types of books you enjoy or are looking for, then you will love this list!


*post contains affiliate links




Named for a flower whose blood-red sap possesses both the power to heal and poison, Bloodroot is a stunning fiction debut about the legacies- of magic and madness, faith and secrets, passion and loss-that haunt one family across the generations, from the Great Depression to today.

The New York Times best selling author of the Girl Who Chased The Moon welcomes you to her newest locale: Walls of Water, North Carolina, where the secrets are thicker than the fog from the town's famous waterfalls, and the stuff of superstition is just as real as you want it to be.


The women of the Waverley family--whether they like it or not--are heirs to an unusual legacy, one that grows in a fenced plot behind their Queen Anne home on Pendland street in Bascom, North Carolina. There, an apple tree bearing fruit of magical properties looms over a garden filled with herbs and edible flowers that possess the power to affect in curious ways anyone who eats them.


In this irresistible novel, Sarah Addison Allen, author of the New York Times bestselling debut, Garden Spells, tells the tale of a young woman whose family secrets- and secret passions-are about to change her life forever.

Sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler is marked by suspicion and disapproval from the moment she arrives on the unfamiliar shores colonial Connecticut in 1687. Alone and desperate, she has been forced to leave her beloved home on the island of Barbados and join a family she has never met. Torn between her quest for belonging and her desire to be true to herself, Kit struggles to survive in a hostile place.


From Nora Roberts comes a trilogy about the land we are drawn to, the family we learn to cherish, and the people we long to love... With indifferent parents, Iona Sheehan grew up craving devotion and acceptance. From her maternal grandmother, she learned where to find both: a land of lush forests, dazzling lakes, and centuries-old legends. Ireland.

Also Books #2 and #3


Susanna desperately wants to join the circle of girls who meet every week at the parsonage. What she doesn't realize is that the girls are about to set off a torrent of false accusations leading to the imprisonment and execution of countless innocent people. Susanna faces a painful choice.

Fledgling witch Morgana must defend her love, her home, and her life in this enthralling tale perfect for fans of Discovery of Witches. In her small early nineteenth century Welsh town, there is no one quite like Morgana, who has not spoken since she was a young girl. Her silence is a mystery, as well as her magic.


I hope you all will enjoy these books as much as I did. You can also check out my shelf and any reviews I have done on them.
Happy reading and Happy Fall!





Sunday, September 9, 2018

Book Review: A High and Hidden Place by Michele Claire Lucas


A High and Hidden Place
by 
Michele Claire Lucas

*This post contains affiliate links
Quote:
"I had a family, a big family, I had a town. I had a best friend. I had a house with a garden. I had a grandfather who was a printer. I had a grandfather who was a bookbinder. Isn't that a wonderful thing to be?"~ Christine pg.202
Started: August 26, 2018
Finished: September 6, 2018
hardback 288 pages


From the cover:
(prologue)
I was brought, at the age of six, to a convent, a cloistered place of asylum from the world that was roiling and thundering and awash in blood. I did not know then, of course, that the whole world was teeming with the motherless, the fatherless, the homeless, the dispossessed. I did not know then that I was an orphan among orphans, one of so many everywhere in the world, made so by events beyond my sight, beyond my awareness, in any case beyond my six-year-old ability to comprehend...I soon enough forgot my mother and the rest of my family. They had disappeared from my sight in a day, and then gradually, with the months and then the years, from my mind and my heart. The angel mothers became my parents, the other orphan girls, who were indeed no angel children after all, became my siblings. It may be difficult to believe, but my childhood, both before and after the terrible day of the fire, was a very happy one. But though I did not know it, I would forevermore be Christine of Oradour, with all that that appellation implied.

My Review:
I absolutely loved this book! I really felt it. It was by far one of the best written, although fiction books that I really believed.
"Fiction by fact" is one of my favorite types of books.
Michele Claire Lucas has done an amazing job of creating the character of one girl who lived through actual events.
While Christine of Oradour is fictional, Oradour-sur-Glane, France is an actual place, where a very heartless massacre occurred.

On June 10, 1944 by order of  Waffen SS officer Adolf Otto Diekmann, all residents, mostly farmers, shopkeepers,  housewives, children, and elderly were summoned to the town square, where they were then separated men from women and children.
The men were corralled into barns while the women and children were sent into the church.
The men were mostly shot in the knees or legs first to keep them from running, and for torture and later the barns were caught on fire. The women were burned alive inside the church.
Read on here for more on the actual events:  Oradour-sur-Glane massacre

The photo was taken some years after the massacre occurred. My understanding is the town was left as is, as a memorial to those lives lost. The village is abandoned.

In the book, Christine Lenoir is a journalist during the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, and is watching the television when Lee Harvey Oswald is shot. The scene and sound on the television trigger memories Christine has long forgotten. While, she has no idea what they mean, she knows that they are very real. She has seen a man killed before. But how? And when?
Her parents died of influenza when she was only six years old and she then lived a quiet, un-tormented childhood inside the convent, raised by peaceful nuns. 
Christine goes back to the convent, the safest place she knows. She doesn't understand the images she sees over and over, but she must find out what they mean.
The Sisters must know something. Is Christine ready for the answers?


Get the book here!


Don't miss out on this wonderful story!







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