The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells by Rachel Greenlaw is a book about longings and belonging, and not-belonging, about families, love, friendship, community and heritage. I had some frustrations with each of the viewpoint characters, and I’m uneasy with some of the conflict resolutions, but overall, it was an easy and mildly spooky read.
The book opens with Carrie Morgan returning to her hometown of Woodsmoke after a 10-year absence — or rather, to the cabin she just inherited from her late mother Ida. It’s a while before she works up the courage to actually go into town, because she’d left quite abruptly, leaving her fiance Tom at the altar and never so much as writing a postcard to her best friend Jess as she traveled around Europe. Her plan is to renovate the cabin, sell it, and leave again.
Her great-aunt, Cora, has other ideas. The Morgan women have a long tradition of making bargains with the mountains, along with making folk remedies, giving warnings never to step off the paths into the wilds, and basically meddling with the townsfolks’ lives to try to protect them. Cora wants Carrie to stay forever and take up the Morgan mantle, and their inherited book of spells, remedies and stories.
Meanwhile, Carrie meets a mysterious stranger, Matthieu, and hires him to help with the renovations. She initially scoffs at Cora’s warning that this man may be a mountain manifestation who’ll break her heart and vanish when the frost melts. As Cora’s tentative relationship with Matthieu deepens, we also see flashbacks revealing backstory including the beginnings of Cora’s courtship by Howard, plus the challenges they now face as an aging couple, along with the rising tensions between the now-married Jess and Tom that surfaced with Carrie’s return.
Although I started out with little sympathy for Carrie’s abandonment of her roots and friendships, I came to understand that this was partly due to unconscious reactions from her life having been meddled with before. Everyone else but Howard has secrets about bargains they’ve made in the past, and there is very little openness about what people really want. There is a lot of blame going around from people who are far from guiltless themselves. But given how things resolve mostly happily at the end, there is some hope that the next generation will learn to talk about their feelings before things go bad.
Despite the many references to “the mountains” and plants that grow around them, I didn’t get a strong sense of place — no mountain is individually named, for instance (fake names for fake mountains would have been fine with me, but I don’t think they’d be so nebulous for the inhabitants). In fact, for quite a while I assumed this was set in the Appalachians instead of England, until I was clued in by words like “greengrocer” being used.
Moreover, Carrie is an artist, but she’s creatively blocked, so we never see her process, although it’s stated that she has started to sketch again, off-camera, by the end. For these and other reasons, the novel never felt quite grounded to me. But that fits quite well with Carrie’s emotional state, as she struggles to decide what’s real and what’s not, and whether she can trust herself and others, and with the mental and emotional turmoil of the other characters. The arguments did feel pretty real, although I was often offering counter-arguments to them in my head.
This is a pretty light read, but then again, it’s not trying to be a heavy book. It’s primarily a semi-supernatural romance, blended with mystery, home renovations, inheritances, and homecoming. If that sounds like your kind of thing, it may be a good choice for reading this October.
The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells by Rachel Greenlaw is officially being released Oct. 22; you can pre-order it here.
Content warnings: References to curses and disappearances; family strife
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC from the publisher for review.
