The Book of Witching
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15
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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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I was pretty disappointed by this book. It was my choice from the subscription box ‘Book of the Month' this month, and I had been skipping BOTM for many months. I decided to select this creepy book for October, even though it didn't seem that interesting to me. I was hoping it would be good and surprise me. BOTM's quick take is: “A mysterious hiking accident kicks off this sp**ky tale of witchcraft, revenge, and a mother's search for answers.” Additionally, their full synopsis does not cover that there is a second narrative taking place in the past at all. In retrospect, I should have just skipped another month, and maybe I should cancel my subscription altogether.
The book is just over 350 pages and I got to page 74 before giving up. There were a few things that bothered me: First, different narratives in different time periods. This seems to be a big trend these days, and most of the time if this is in a synopsis in a book, I will not read it. It's just not interesting to me to read virtually two different stories that somehow come together in the end. The synopsis offered by BOTM did not really point to different narratives in the book. One is modern day (2024), and the other is far in the past (1594), and they are (or will be from my point-of-view as a reader who stopped reading) connected by witchcraft. I found the modern day story very intriguing and almost enjoyed those chapters, and often when I flipped to a new chapter set in 1594, I audibly groaned.
Second, 74 pages in and I'm utterly uninterested in half the book? That's a problem. Third, the writing is quite poor. Not only is it in present tense, which, to me, is unenjoyable to read, but sentence variation, descriptions, tension, character and plot development were all extremely lacking. It was just so uninteresting.
Let me go back to the line level for a moment: I'd read sentences like (not an exact quote): “Clem puts on her shoes and walks out the door. Clem gets in the car and drives to the hospital. Clem speaks to the doctors.” Maybe I'm being a bit over-the-top, but this is what it felt like. Also, another pet peeve is this flip of the hand to try to build tension at the end of a chapter (not an exact quote):
“They place me back in chains and pull me down the stairs.
To the dungeon.”
I am not alarmed by this. I'm annoyed that, “To the dungeon,” is not a sentence.
So, all-in-all, I don't recommend this and really want my time and money back.
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