Publication Date: October 5, 2021
A Most Anticipated Novel by Pop Sugar * Book Riot * Betches * Bustle * and more!
“Utterly spellbinding….Witchcraft meets thriller.”—Pop Sugar
Two sisters go missing on a remote Scottish island. Twenty years later, one is found–but she’s still the same age as when she disappeared. The secrets of witches have reached across the centuries in this chilling Gothic thriller from the author of the acclaimed The Nesting.
When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it’s an opportunity to start over with her three daughters–Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go missing, she’s frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings, supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed.
Twenty-two years later, Luna has been searching for her missing sisters and mother. When she receives a call about her youngest sister, Clover, she’s initially ecstatic. Clover is the sister she remembers–except she’s still seven years old, the age she was when she vanished. Luna is worried Clover is a wildling. Luna has few memories of her time on the island, but she’ll have to return to find the truth of what happened to her family. But she doesn’t realize just how much the truth will change her.
C. J. Cooke, author of A Haunting in the Attic and The Nesting, brings another eerie thriller filled with suspense, witchcraft, and folklore in The Lighthouse Witches.
High up on the cliffs of a remote Scottish island is a lighthouse that has weathered storms for centuries.
Liv Stay has fled to the island Lòn Haven with her three daughters—Saffy, Luna, and Clover—to escape truths she’d rather not face.
Lòn Haven was meant to be safe. But soon, strange things start to happen—haunting noises in the dead of night, animal skeletons left on Liv’s doorstep, and strangest of all, unknown children at the lighthouse, who disappear without a trace.
The villagers say it’s the work of witches. They say that the children are dark omens sent to destroy them. Liv doesn’t know what to believe. But within months, nine-year-old Luna will be the only one of the family left.
Twenty years after that dark year on Lon Haven, Luna is still haunted by questions—what happened to her sisters and her mother? To find out, she must return to the lighthouse on Lòn Haven, the one place she promised she would never revisit.
When Liv, a mother of three, runs away to a remote island in Scotland to escape a reality she isn’t ready to face, she unknowingly drops herself and her three children into a world of folklore, witchcraft, and suspicion that threatens to break her family.
I’ll admit, I struggled with this book. I gave this book 4 stars for two reasons. One, when seemingly rational characters make completely irrational decisions, I start to fall out of the story. Initially, it’s easy to see how Liv thinks Lòn Haven, a remote island in Scotland, will be a nice quiet place for her children. However, as the story continues, Liv is shown sign after sign that the island is dangerous, yet she stays. Her character is described as someone who makes a lot of gut decisions, yet in this situation, she decides not to follow her instinct which I find odd.
The second reason for my 4-star review is I found the story a bit too busy. There were a lot of moving parts, and I didn’t think all of them were explained as well as they could have been.
Moving on to the positives. I always appreciate it when an author brings true stories into a fictional tale. The stories of people being falsely accused of witchcraft are very real, and one can see how a small island with a history of witchcraft would fall prey to believing in curses and folklore.
As there are many different storylines to follow, The Lighthouse Witches is a story that will be very hard to put down, especially since the whole story doesn’t fully fall into place until the last few chapters.
The Lighthouse Witches is an eerie psychological thriller of witchcraft, folklore, an inability to face reality, and the element that ties them all together—fear.
C. J. Cooke is an award-winning poet and novelist published in twenty-three languages. She teaches creative writing at the University of Glasgow, where she also researches the impact of motherhood on women’s writing and creative writing interventions for mental health.
Hey, I read this book! 🙂
I liked it.