It’s 2024. Erin, her boyfriend, and her best friend are on a hiking trip, but somehow one of them has gone missing and the other two are found badly burned and left for dead. Flashback 400-some-odd years to 1594. Alison, the local healer, is approached to help fulfill an unthinkable request, but her refusal comes at an impossibly high price. C.J. Cooke’s THE BOOK OF WITCHING explores the ties that bind these two women across time and the power of a mother’s love.
Fans who are fond of Cooke’s exploration of feminist themes will find THE BOOK OF WITCHING to be a more thrilling take on the traditional gothic novel. As in her previous works, the depths of the mother-child bond are explored from each of the lenses of Alison, Erin, and Erin’s mother, Clem. Cooke also takes on witchcraft, its use to make women society’s scapegoats, and the price of conforming for the benefit of the larger whole. Dual points of view enrich the story and keep it moving along at a faster pace, and readers will find themselves eager to switch between timelines to see what happens next. Although some readers may favor one point of view over the other, Cooke delivers equally well-developed characters and storylines in each timeframe and even uses a true story of a historical witch trial as a jumping point for imagining Alison’s story arc.
Some may find that THE BOOK OF WITCHING takes a bit of time to grab their interest. At first, many characters are introduced and it can be difficult to remember who’s who, especially in the earlier timeframe. As the story unfolds, this resolves itself. While the conclusion is certainly surprising and satisfying, it does come across as confusing and as leaving some ends loose or not as fully explored as possible.
THE BOOK OF WITCHING is Cooke’s latest annual release of a thrilling gothic novel. If you are looking for a well-researched book that weaves witchcraft, magic, and the lengths one will go to for the sake of one's family, this is just the Halloween season read for you!
A mother must fight for her daughter’s life in this fierce and haunting tale of witchcraft and revenge from the author of A Haunting in the Arctic.
Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.
Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?
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