Thornewicke

A young woman. An ancient inheritance. A wood that remembers everything.

It is 1883, and Evangeline Price is finishing her exams, attending suffragette rallies with her best friend Caroline, and trying very hard to convince herself that animals do not actually answer her thoughts.

She is not entirely successful.

When a mysterious aunt she never knew existed summons her to Dragonspire, a centuries-old ancestral estate in the north, Evangeline enters a world she was born for but never prepared to face. The wood called Thornewicke is alive in ways that defy rational explanation. Trees shift their positions at night. Ghost willows bloom without sunlight. Wisps dart through the mist with voices and intentions of their own. And at the boundary wall that separates Dragonspire from its cold, predatory neighbor, shadow-ghosts wait with a patience that suggests they have done this before.

Henoria, Evangeline's aunt, is brilliant, commanding, and surrounded by gifted people she has quietly collected over the years. Nikola Tesla experiments with lightning on the neighboring estate. A young ward named Rafe manages Tesla's legal affairs and carries secrets of his own. A minister named Alistair tells ghost stories that turn out to be true. And Julian Musgrave, the estate's brooding magistrate neighbor, arrives at Dragonspire with legal documents in one hand and an agenda no one has fully uncovered.

The women of Evangeline's line have always been chosen. Her grandmother died in the wood. Her mother fled south and abandoned her gifts. Evangeline is the most powerful born in generations, and the darkness at the boundary wall knows it.

Thornewicke blends the atmosphere of Victorian Gothic fiction with the wonder of magical realism and the richness of historical fantasy. Readers who love strong female protagonists, inherited gifts, mysterious ancestral estates, lush atmospheric settings, and a slow-building sense of ancient magic rooted in faith rather than darkness will find themselves completely at home here.

For fans of atmospheric historical fantasy with a coming-of-age heart, Thornewicke is a story about what happens when a young woman stops running from what she is and steps, at last, into the light.