I just finished the book Weyward, by Emilia Hart. It’s one of those books that seduced me both with its cover (a crow and a bunch of beautiful botanical illustrations) and the first third of its description, which sounds like a gothic novel written by Victoria Holt or Mary Stuart. You know the plot—a young woman inherits a cottage in the country from an aunt she hasn’t seen since she was six years old, and retreats there to escape from danger, only to encounter more mysteries from her past, and ultimately comes into her own by recognizing how she fits into her family’s history.

I would have been happier, I think, had the plot just stuck to that, with some flashback through the lens of the character Kate. Instead, what this book does is present parallel stories of three young women from the same family/bloodline who lived in the cottage at widely disparate times, from 1619 to 2019, and it didn’t quite work for me. I felt constantly dissatisfied by the amount of information we would get about one of the three before jumping to one of the others; although I liked the characters, I felt like each of them was given short shrift because there wasn’t enough space to tell their stories as completely as might have been done. I also wasn’t sure I needed to read three such desperate accounts of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse!

The book is touted as empowering, but although each of the women—Altha, Violet, and Kate—triumphs over tragedy in the end, the fact that it is with the help of some witchy magical realism makes it harder to focus on their progress. And honestly, the story is quite polarizing, in that all the men are uniformly horrid (except for Kate’s father, who’s dead), and all the women are victims hyper-focused on childbirth and legacy, who manage to rise above with assistance from their connection with nature. I can’t decide if the book was too long or not long enough, because I felt periodically bored while reading it, but also wanted more details on some aspects!

Bottom line, I didn’t hate it but wish I’d spent my time reading something less depressing, for which I had more affinity. If you want a good witchy/magical book, read The Once and Future Witches, by Alix Harrow, instead, or try any one of half a dozen of Alice Hoffman‘s.

Kudos to the cover artist, though.