A few of my favorite reads…
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All tagged witch
As anyone familiar with her other works would expect, Sarah J Maas’s Throne of Glass series includes a hefty dose of struggles (both internal and external) among a growing cast of characters who all come together in the hope of making a better world through love and friendship.
Among the notable witch-themed novels out this year is Alix E Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (2020). Harrow creates a late nineteenth-century fictional world of Crow County (think southern Appalachia) and the New Salem (one hundred miles south of the ruins of old Salem). From its opening line, magic runs through The Once and Future Witches, as three wayward sisters, whom life has separated for seven years, find themselves drawn to the same city square on the same day.
I convened with the Owens family in Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic (1995), Rules of Magic (2017), and Magical Lessons (2020). By reading all three novels together, I enjoyed a month of magically lovable witches battling the challenges and frustrations of being independent creatures in a world that doesn’t appreciate their unconventional style or power. Hoffman’s novels build prequel upon prequel as she works closer and closer to the root of the Owens’ family story and its curse.
In the weeks leading up to Halloween 2018, my family headed east to Boston and coastal Massachusetts. In addition to the Boston downtown (and all its Freedom Trail historical glory), we visited both Salem and New Bedford, Massachusetts. In preparation for our trip I chose to read Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife: or, the Star Gazer (1999).
