The Witch of Willow Hall has all the right bits to recommend it: family drama, a handsome and gentlemanly hero, a family secret (more than one actually!) and a heroine who learns about herself while trying to hold her family together. The book opens on a day, a decade past, when our heroine, Lydia Montrose, finds herself facing off with the neighborhood bully who seems to get a sense of pleasure out of being mean and cruel. When he goes too far Lydia sees red and sets out to teach him a lesson. This is the event that should show Lydia she’s different than other people; instead her mother insists they never speak of it and so Lydia never quite understands what it means to injure a boy yet never lay a hand on him. It also means when her family moves from Boston to New Oldbury to avoid the gossips and stares of the Boston upper crust who have given them the cold shoulder since the rumors started about her brother and sister, Charles and Catherine, she is unprepared for the happenings around her new house. She questions herself and doubts what she sees, hears, and experiences until her own ignorance has consequences for those she loves.
I enjoyed The Witch of Willow Hall enough that when I finally had the chance to really sit and read it I breezed through it in one day. I found myself eager to get back to the story to see what happens next and I flipped to the last few pages of the book to see just how things would turn out, something I only do when I really really enjoy a book and its characters. (I know, I’m weird. Go with it.) It is a compelling story and as a first novel I definitely going to be watching for more from Fox.
My biggest regret about the book is we don’t really see how Lydia goes from the timid, unsure girl at the beginning of the book to the woman we finally start to see at its conclusion and that’s a tragedy because I’d love to have seen more of that in both her mundane life and the otherworldly one. We get glimpses of the transformation and the incidents that begin to shape who she will eventually become yet I don’t think we really see her go through the transformation. I have a feeling this is something that Fox will get better at the more she writes.
For instance, we see Lydia talking to spirits and experiencing her powers yet she never seems to understand anything about what that might mean for her. Then suddenly it’s as if someone flips a switch and she has this “oh THAT’s what’s going on!” epiphany. I wanted to shake some sense into the girl on more than one page because it was like she was being willfully ignorant. I swear even her ancestor wanted to roll their eyes at Lydia at one point… well, if they had eyes. I wish Lydia (and so the reader) would have learned more about her ties to Salem and the powers of her family.
Even the more normal aspects of her life had a similar feeling. She just. Didn’t. GET. It a lot of the time. It’s clear to the reader Lydia and her crush have feelings for each other. Yet again I found myself wanting to roll my eyes at Lydia. She’s so good at comparing herself to her sister Catherine that she sees what she believes she should see. I understand that’s her self-doubt is a strong factor in why she is as she is; much as with Lydia’s powers I wish we would have seen more of the development of her finding her confidence.
These things don’t ruin the book for me. As I said, the characters are compelling, the backstory is interesting, and the book does have that creepy Gothic flair. I’m glad I read it and I will recommend it when it come out. Thanks to NetGalley and Graydon House Books for giving me the opportunity to read this before it was published.
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