The best books to leave you 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.