The Orphan Witch
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"Mystical, magical, and wildly original...If Alice Hoffman and Sara Addison Allen had a witchy love child, she would be Paige Crutcher. Do not miss this beautifully realized debut!"--- JT Ellison, New York Times bestselling author of Her Dark Lies on The Orphan Witch.
A deeper magic. A stronger curse. A family lost...and found.
Persephone May has been alone her entire life. Abandoned as an infant and dragged through the foster care system, she wants nothing more than to belong somewhere. To someone. However, Persephone is as strange as she is lonely. Unexplainable things happen when she’s around—changes in weather, inanimate objects taking flight—and those who seek to bring her into their family quickly cast her out. To cope, she never gets attached, never makes friends. And she certainly never dates. Working odd jobs and always keeping her suitcases half-packed, Persephone is used to moving around, leaving one town for another when curiosity over her eccentric behavior inevitably draws unwanted attention.
After an accidental and very public display of power, Persephone knows it’s time to move on once again. It’s lucky, then, when she receives an email from the one friend she’s managed to keep, inviting her to the elusive Wile Isle. The timing couldn’t be more perfect. However, upon arrival, Persephone quickly discovers that Wile is no ordinary island. In fact, it just might hold the very things she’s been searching for her entire life.
Answers. Family. Home.
And some things she did not want. Like 100-year-old curses and an even older family feud. With the clock running out, love might be the magic that saves them all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Estranged family, oblique riddles, and a profusion of mechanistic magic systems leave Crutcher's dramatic, witchy fantasy debut difficult to place. A century earlier, a powerful curse trapped the witches of Wile Isle, N.C. Now 30-something Persephone May—a foundling shuffled between foster homes because of her strange, violent powers—is invited to the island by her new friend Hyacinth Ever. She accepts, desperate to end her rootless social detachment, and finds both family and magic. Persephone is Hyacinth's long-lost cousin and a rare aether witch who can walk through worlds—and she's prophesized to free Wile's witches before they're lost forever. But to break the curse, Persephone must face down the Way sisters, fellow witches who fear tampering with the status quo; confront her intense attraction to a handsome, otherworldly librarian; and contend with a sinister, invasive magic. The narrative voice, with its simplistic explanations of character's emotions, feels geared to young readers, while the extensive magical rules and endless taxonomies of mystical secrets become exhausting and never quite connect. Crutcher's complex worldbuilding is impressive, but fails to save this curiously unmoored story.
