The Lighthouse Witches

In the late 1990s an artist and single mother of three young girls has been given a potentially terminal diagnosis. A diagnosis that has plagued many of the women in her family. Liv finds it hard to face this fate and what it entails so jumps at the chance to take a job painting a mural in a lighthouse on a small island in northern Scotland. Liv and her daughters soon find out that there is a very dark history behind the lighthouse they now call home. The story spans from the 1600s, when women were burned for witchcraft, to 1998, when Liv and the girls arrive at the lighthouse and then to modern day. The author weaves the stories from across these time periods and creates a chilling gothic thriller that hooked me from the minute I started it. I finished this book in one day and I am a new fan of CJ Cooke. I already reserved her book "The Nesting" for next week

4.0

The Lighthouse Witches is a blend of several genres: Gothic, paranormal, and mystery. At the outset, author C. J. Cooke expertly sets the eerie, evocative scene: a decommissioned lighthouse called the Longing on the Scottish island of Lon Haven. It is "a white bolt locking earth, sky, and ocean together. . . . [L]ovely in its decrepitude, feathery paint gnawed off by north winds and rust-blazed window frames signatures of use and purpose." It stands one hundred and forty-nine feet tall and offers breathtaking views from the lantern room accessed by climbing one hundred and thirty-eight steps. In a first-person narrative, Liv describes arriving on Lon Haven in 1998 and seeing it for the first time with a sense of haunting familiarity, even though she has never been there before. She has come to the island with her children in tow looking for a fresh start, on the run from an unpleasant truth she is too frightened to face head-on. She is well aware of "how stupid" her thought process is, but is unable to disavow herself of the ludicrous notion that if she just ignores the problem it will go away. They are to live in the rustic lighthouse keeper's cottage while Liv paints a mural inside the lighthouse that has been commissioned by the owner, Patrick Roberts. He wants the mural to be "stunning and inspiring" and plans to turn the lighthouse into a writing studio.

Sapphire immediately finds a grimoire -- an old book of spells -- on the cottage's bookshelf. Cooke inserts excerpts of "The Grimoire of Patrick Roberts," which details the life of a local family who "lived our lives by magic" in 1662 and what ultimately happened to them. Liv and her children learn there were witch hunts not just in the United States, but also in Scotland and England. In fact, women believed to be witches were imprisoned in a dungeon underneath the lighthouse before being burned if they were found guilty of witchcraft. One of those witches cursed the island as she was dying, and a young child went missing there thirty years earlier. According to the boy's sister, another child was found a year later who looked just like him, but bearing a telltale mark on his neck. Was he a wildling, sent to kill every member of his family until their bloodline was destroyed?

Sapphire's first-person narrative expresses her dismay at being dragged from her school, friends, and boyfriend in New York to live in the "arse-end of nowhere." She misses her stepfather, Sean, who died in a car accident, and daydreams about her biological father materializing. Liv and Sapphire have an unsurprisingly fraught relationship -- at fifteen, the always headstrong girl has grown disrespectful and defiant. But Liv loves all her girls boundlessly and struggles to balance raising them as a single mother with accepting commissions for paintings and teaching art.

Yet another narrative is set in 2021 and focuses on Luna, who has only fragmented memories of the time she spent on Lon Haven. Her psychiatrist has explained that whatever happened to her all those years ago was so horrific that she dissociated, "effectively checking out of the horror," her memories deeply buried in her mind. Liv abandoned her when she was just nine years old. "No explanation. No apparent motivation. Just dumped her in the woods and vanished into thin air." Now she and her boyfriend, Ethan, are expecting their first child. She has vowed never to return to Lon Haven, but maintains Facebook pages devoted to her missing sisters, Sapphire and Clover, neither of whom have ever been accounted for since they went missing more than two decades ago.

But then Luna receives a life-changing call. Clover has been found! Since she was seven when she disappeared, she is twenty-nine years old now. But when Luna rushes to the hospital to meet the "wee girl" who has been found, she is disappointed. It's not Clover at all. It's a seven-year-old girl. But the girl bears an uncanny resemblance to Clover and asks why Sapphire is carrying the stuffed giraffe Clover adored. Sapphire kept it in the intervening years. The girl has knowledge of other matters, as well, that only Clover could possess.

Cooke weaves a tale of increasing angst in 1998. The creepy lighthouse has been vandalized with horrific symbols, but as Liv prepares to bring the mural to life, she makes other unsettling discoveries. She meets Patrick Roberts, the "island's mystery millionaire," who turns out to be much younger and more eccentric than anticipated. And disturbing details come to light about how he came to own the lighthouse.

Meanwhile, in 2021, Luna struggles with the prospect of marrying Ethan and takes custody of Clover, who insists that she just left the cottage on Lon Haven the night before she was found. She was discovered wandering on the side of the road, claiming that she'd gone looking for Luna. And she has an inexplicable mark on her hip.

Cooke deftly alternates the narratives into a cohesive tale of witchcraft, curses, time travel, and legends that mystify and frighten her characters and mesmerize readers. Liv is an empathetic character -- a single mother doing her best to care for her children and earn a living after experiencing trauma. She is frightened and in denial about what the future might hold for her and her daughters. Sapphire is a typically inquisitive, willful teenager trying to assert her independence, while Luna is a young woman who survived early traumatization but has found a man who loves her and is attempting to lead as normal a life as possible when it is upended by the reappearance of Clover. But it can't really be Clover. So Luna has to return to Lon Haven to face her own demons and determine who Clover really is.

As the narratives meld cohesively, Cooke gradually reveals the details of her uniquely inventive plot as she gradually accelerates the story's pace and ramps up the dramatic tension. She assembles a world in which wildlings (also known as fae or fairies), witches, and magic exist, and reveals the true motives of Patrick Roberts. She also explains precisely what happened to Liv and Sapphire, as well as Clover's true identity, and provides a conclusion that is surprisingly emotional yet fitting and, ultimately, uplifting and hopeful. In the process, she relates a tale that is engrossing and entertaining. With her richly descriptive prose and thoughtful examination of parent-child relationships, lost love, and the power of fear, she might make believers even of readers for whom the genre is outside their comfort zone.

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy of the book.

Saffy is an angsty teen, annoyed by her younger sisters Luna and Clover, and determined to make her mother Olivia suffer for bringing them to the remote island of Lon Haven. The island is home to the Longing Lighthouse and steeped in a history of witch hunts and curses. When Saffy's angst leads to her own disappearance and then the disappearances of Clover and Olivia, Luna is left orphaned. Twenty years later, Clover returns but has not aged. What happened to Luna's family? This book highlights Scottish culture, landscape, and folklore and served as my introduction to the topic of the Scottish witch hunts. The author's notes at the end go into some brief detail about King James VI and his absolutely misogynistic view that women were the "weaker vessel...more likely to be deceived by the Devil." This resulted in thousands of women being (wrongfully) accused, tried and put to death with no proper defense under the Witchcraft Act. She goes on to talk about the current efforts being made to seek justice for these women and draws parallels to the #MeToo movement, among others.

Some of us loved it. It read like a novel, but included supernatural elements, combined with history and a love story. But others didn’t like that it jumped around between characters and times. It got a little confusing. We liked that it wraps everything up at the end, answering almost all our questions.