I was an unusual child. My favorite stories were fairytales, no tale was too tall for me. On Christmas Eve, my father always read a story called “Giant Grummer’s Christmas” because it was my favorite. Giant Grummer lived in a huge castle made of limburger cheese. He threatened to reach his long arm down chimneys to steal the presents Santa left but Santa saved the day by giving Giant Grummer presents too. Folklore, legends, and magic are important. We need to believe more in the “make believe.” Everyone should read stories about ghosts and witches and cheese-eating giants, anything fantastical to open their worlds and set their imaginations free.
Fifteen compellingly dark stories, Echoes from The Hocker House is modern day folklore with characters who find magical ways to live triumphantly. Meet people who are both mysterious and recognizable, haunting yet endearing, triumphant yet tragic, terrified while unfailingly brave. These stories are as arresting as they are comforting. No one discovers doors out of darkness the way these characters do. How do they do it? In some ways you might expect, through friendship and family, dreams dreamed, and the risks taken, but leave plenty of room to open your heart and your mind to the unexpected. You will meet a young girl who becomes a stone angel, another one who becomes a beloved, seaside witch. Feed your imagination. It’s hungry. Dare to be spellbound!
Alix Harrow writes that “behind every witch is a women wronged.”
Here are three sisters wronged by an abusive father who have hurt and betrayed each other in the past, but the bonds of love and sisterhood and witchcraft are stronger.
This book is for every woman because every woman has felt powerless. Every woman has been marginalized and dismissed but these three sisters prove to all of us that there is great power when women come together as they have throughout history.
I was rooting like crazy for these the sisters to prevail. I was charmed by the spells they cast based on fairy tales, nursery rhymes, lullabies. This is a book rooted in feminist tradition told in the tradition of great folklore.
'Glorious . . . a tale that will sweep you away' Yangsze Choo, New York Times bestselling author of The Night Tiger
'A gorgeous and thrilling paean to the ferocious power of women' Laini Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of Strange the Dreamer
In 1893, there's no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box.
I was drawn to the setting and the plot of this book. The main character Zoey has inherited her mother’s condominium on Mallow Island off the South Carolina coast.
Zoey’s mother died when Zoey was a child, so she is anxious to make some connection with her mother by seeing what she left behind in a condominium the mother stayed in alone throughout her married life from time to time.
Since I was never close to my own mother, I wanted to go on this journey with Zoey who has a delightful, invisible pet, a bird named Pigeon. At The Dellawisp condos, Zoey discovers magical turquoise birds that watch everything. They enter condos at will and steal random objects, hanging them in courtyard trees. Those little devils!
She meets the other residents, including three ghosts, all with their own mysteries to solve. A cast of characters that bond in friendship and healing you won’t forget.
From the acclaimed author of Garden Spells comes an enchanting tale of lost souls, lonely strangers, secrets that shape us, and how the right flock can guide you home.
Down a narrow alley in the small coastal town of Mallow Island, South Carolina, lies a stunning cobblestone building comprised of five apartments. It’s called The Dellawisp and it is named after the tiny turquoise birds who, alongside its human tenants, inhabit an air of magical secrecy.
When Zoey Hennessey comes to claim her deceased mother’s apartment at The Dellawisp, she meets her quirky, enigmatic neighbors…
Who among us hasn’t wondered what their life would have been like if they’d chosen a different college major, if they had taken an opportunity to move halfway around the globe, if they had never married, if they had married, if they’d taken more chances or less of them.
In this book, the main character Nora Seed is so depressed about the state of her life and how unaccomplished and unwanted she feels, she considers suicide and winds up instead inside a library on the edge of the universe which exists between life and death.
The library is filled with infinite books about the different lives she could have lived if she had made different choices. Nora has the opportunity to try some of those other lives and in the process, she discovers what really matters to her and what doesn’t.
I found the book hard to put down. It’s wildly imaginative, very funny at times, and it allowed me to reflect on my own life and discover some things I wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice just to live my life in different ways.
The #1 New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon
Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year
"A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits."-The Washington Post
The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book.
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of…
I wanted to read a book about a person that others consider odd or weird because I’ve known some of these people too. There are some I reached out to and some I wish I had. I feel guilty for those I didn’t try to befriend.
Eleanor is quirky for sure. Her life is so routine it’s disturbing and sadly empty. She works all week, wears the same clothes every day, eats the same lunch, then on weekends she stays mostly in her apartment heating up pizza and drinking vodka. I wasn’t sure if she was just profoundly lonely like many people in the world are or if there was something darker going on with Eleanor, but I fell in love with her.
She is so funny! When she finally makes a real friend in a workmate called Raymond, we recognize in Raymond the kind of person we should all be. Kind and loyal, willing to brave through a friend’s hardest times. He never lets Eleanor down when for most of her life, everyone has let her down.
This novel tells the triumphant story of what human beings can really mean to each other.
"Beautifully written and incredibly funny, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is about the importance of friendship and human connection. I fell in love with Eleanor, an eccentric and regimented loner whose life beautifully unfolds after a chance encounter with a stranger; I think you will fall in love, too!" -Reese Witherspoon
No one's ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine.
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of…
I spent a good amount of time as a child visiting my grandparents who lived in a remote location in the Endless Mountains of northern Pennsylvania. I didn’t like it there very much. I felt isolated from the world. It was too quiet and too dark at night.
I immediately related to Kay Whitaker who lives in the middle of nowhere with no neighbors in the interior wetlands of coastal Georgia. When she meets a boy her age while she’s exploring those wetlands, something she’s not supposed to do, I cheered for her to make a friend and find a way out of the poverty and the dysfunctional family she lived with.
Kay is a great character because she is smart and funny and feisty. This book includes a murder mystery and lots of secrets for the reader to discover along the way. All families have buried secrets they want to keep that way, but this rarely happens.
This book is gritty and brave and the descriptions of these southern wetlands transported me to a place I’d never seen and could not have imagined on my own.
"A masterly achievement." – Publishers Weekly STARRED review
"Many readers are looking for the next Where the Crawdads Sing, and will find The Floating Girls…is a close cousin." – Augusta Chronicle
Fierce 12-year-old Kay can't ignore the problems surfacing in her troubled home―or the mysterious marsh outside. It will take all of her courage and perseverance to survive her family drama as their dark secrets come to life in the wake of a small-town murder.
One hot, sticky summer in Bledsoe, Georgia, twelve-year-old Kay Whitaker stumbles across a stilt house in a neighboring marsh and upon Andy Webber, a boy…
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse to gossip. But when Dolça receives his deathbed note asking to see her, she races across Spain with the intention of unburdening herself of an old secret.
On the journey, she encounters bandits, the Inquisition, illness, and the choices she's made. At its heart, Dulcinea is about how we betray the people we love, what happens when we succumb to convention, and why we squander the few chances we get to change our lives.
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