Whichever book I reviewed next as
part of Neo-Victorian Voices series had a tough act to follow, since I’d rated The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid
Shomer so highly. This time I went to the more commercial end of the spectrum
with Hester Fox’s recent debut, The Witch
of Willow Hall, set in nineteenth-century Massachusetts.
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| The Witch of Willow Hall, Hester Fox (2018) |
Our main character,
Lydia Montrose, is a Boston-born witch who doesn’t know it, a descendent of one
executed in Salem two centuries before. The novel also features a fair number
of ghosts/spirits—hostile and friendly—and supernatural happenings, as well as
family secrets that would still shock today.
But overall it feels
like a book for lovers of Austenian romance, rather than horror fans. There is
sister rivalry and a central marriage plot, and gowns and a ball are key topics
of conversation.
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| Hester Fox |
It’s all solid,
silly, historical fiction fun. The novel is in first person, present tense,
giving it a YA feel, and, while the setting is an unusual one and anachronisms
are generally avoided (except in some of the modern sounding dialogue), Fox
didn’t teach me much about 1820s New England.
The pacing and
plotting are good and Lydia is a well-developed heroine, with love interests
who have personalities of their own. I wanted her sister Catherine to show a
little more depth by the ending. The siblings’ relationships are a high point
of the novel but I was looking for a little complexity about the rights and
wrongs of Lydia and Catherine’s points of view.
If you like your
costume dramas with a shadow of darkness, this may well be a good winter read
for you.
Which twenty-first
century written, nineteenth-century set, novels would you like the Secret
Victorianist to read next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by
tweeting @SVictorianist.
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