Marrow
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
A searing take on femininity and power, Marrow transports readers to a small island off the coast of Maine, where a coven has done the seemingly impossible.
The day Oona was kicked out of her mother’s coven, she gave up on her dreams of harnessing the witchcraft that was her birthright. Years later, she's carved out an ordinary life with her husband, though she is filled with a longing she can barely name. If she could only become a mother, then—according to island lore—she will come into her magic.
But after years of being unable to carry a pregnancy to term, Oona begins to feel desperate. Without the money to seek medical treatment, she decides she must return to the rugged, windswept island where she was raised—and to her dark, enigmatic mother . . . a witch who gives childless women the chance to become mothers.
Oona returns under the cover of anonymity, hoping for an answer. But, despite a celebrity clientele and a long wait-list, there are dark forces at work on the island, and as her time there grows more harrowing, the truth threatens to come to light. How far will Oona go to access the power her mother commands?
Tender and intense, witchy and wise, and written in prose that glitters and seethes, Marrow is a gripping novel about the complex bonds between mothers and daughters, about what we must believe in order to imagine a future for ourselves, and what we must let go in order to fully live it.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Family drama and uncanny suspense entwine in Samantha Browning Shea’s spellbinding and heartbreakingly human debut. After five miscarriages, Oona travels back to her mother’s remote island coven, from which she was cast out years earlier under painful, still-murky circumstances. Now, as Oona seeks the child she longs for, she must also confront the secrets that banished her and the rituals that might demand more than she’s prepared to give. Shea captures the island’s eerie fertility practices with sensory detail that makes them both otherworldly and disturbingly plausible. The fractured relationship between Oona and her mother, Ursula, drives the novel with relentless emotional tension, turning each revelation into both a plot twist and a reopened wound. The prose is atmospheric and assured, filled with salt air, whispered bargains, and emotional stakes that linger long after the final page. Marrow is a gorgeous and unsettling tale about desire, inheritance, and the dangerous bargains struck in pursuit of hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shea debuts with a spellbinding tale of magic and motherhood centered on 30-something hopeful mother Oona. Pregnant again after five miscarriages, Oona makes her way to an island retreat called Bare Root off the coast of Maine, where a group of witches help pregnant women carry their babies to term. Oona has history with Bare Root. Her mother, Ursula, is the manager, and Ursula banished Oona at 18 under mysterious circumstances that are revealed later. What's more, her husband Jacob's late sister, Daphne, died by suicide as a guest at Bare Root, back when Oona still lived there. Disguised now as a registered guest who couldn't make it to the retreat, she shows up and participates in a protection spell. After Jacob's unexpected arrival, the secrets of the past gradually come to light, and Oona gets a chance to redeem herself for what happened to Daphne and reverse a curse that may have caused her miscarriages. While the narrative can be choppy in its transitions between the many plot threads, it has plenty to say about what it means to be a mother ("Motherhood granted a woman access to power," Oona muses), and it delivers a shocking twist. This potent concoction gets the job done.
