Enchanted Books Archives – Enchanted Living Magazine https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/category/writing/enchanted-books/ Quarterly magazine that celebrates all things enchanted. Sun, 08 Jun 2025 12:58:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 Ode to Foxfire https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/ode-to-foxfire/ Fri, 13 Jun 2025 11:00:12 +0000 https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/?p=10590 The post Ode to Foxfire appeared first on Enchanted Living Magazine.

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Some people carry wicker baskets into the woods and fill them with chanterelles and morels. They gather wild mushrooms to plop into soups and sprinkle on salads. I occasionally enjoy mushrooms myself, baked into focaccia or simmered with vegetables. But when I go into the woods with an eye toward fungi, I’m not usually hoping to harvest dinner. I’m hunting for glimpses of wonder.

interesting, but bioluminescent mushroom species—often referred to as foxfire—are especially precious, because they glow with living light. Foxfire turns forest floors into dreamworlds, the realm of fairy tales and mystical creatures. The mushrooms seem too magical to be real, but foxfire—ounce for ounce, arguably the most enchanted fungi in all the land—is as real as real can be. And you can find it all over the world. Bioluminescent mushrooms glow in North American hardwood forests, under the rain-dripping leaves of Brazil, and among the bamboo groves of Japan. Spin a globe under your finger and you’ll likely find foxfire not far from wherever your pointer lands.

Historically, various species of foxfire were collected in jars to serve as lanterns. The mushrooms have been used to outline pathways in the dark, and they once illuminated the hulls of early submarines. Our word foxfire is thought to have derived from the French faux, for “false,” making the term “fake fire.” But whatever the etymology, almost everywhere foxfire is found, folklore associates it with mysterious, supernatural forces—and often with those fire-furred woodland animals. In Japan, for example, foxfire is associated with ghostly light said to appear in the presence of foxes. In Finland, foxes are famously known to move through the woods with brushy tails that twinkle. It’s rumored that they’re sometimes able to even ignite things with their tails, as though they’re painting with fire.

In my home region of southern Appalachia—where foxes flit out of woods with regularity and foxfire fungi is abundant— foxfire species include jack-o’-lantern mushrooms, large and orange as pumpkins, and bitter oysters that in the dark looklike coins of light. To find them, I’ve learned that patience is required. Glowing mushrooms are subtle; they reveal themselves only to those who allow their night vision to ripen.

When I set out to find foxfire, I take time to experience light sifting out of this world. I rest on mossy logs and let my eyes adjust slowly, in unison with dusk. In time, I can often see mycelium consuming fallen leaves, like glowing cotton candy on the forest floor, whereas before dark I saw only clumps of ordinary leaf litter. Sometimes only in the dark is the ordinary revealed to be extraordinary. Of this, foxfire is a beautiful reminder.

Many mushrooms release their spores in tiny clouds that swirl in the wind. I have never seen it myself, but I’ve heard that when bioluminescent mushrooms do this, their spores glow in midair as miniature clouds of light. That seems worth seeking out—a quest yet to be undertaken. In the fungal world, there’s always something magical awaiting.

Many mushrooms release their spores in tiny clouds that swirl in the wind. I have never seen it myself, but I’ve heard that when bioluminescent mushrooms do this, their spores glow in midair as miniature clouds of light. That seems worth seeking out—a quest yet to be undertaken. In the fungal world, there’s always something magical awaiting.

Bitter oysters are not something you’d want to simmer in stew or toss in a salad. But it’s impossible to question their value if you’ve ever seen them alight. In a world that seems so overexplored and overlit with artificial light, discovering glowing mushrooms in natural darkness delivers a giant helping of awe. In this way, foraging inedible foxfire provides its own sort of nourishment.

Henion’s book Night Magic, published by Algonquin Books, can be found wherever books are sold. Learn more about Leigh Ann Henion at leighannhenion.com.

Art: Nature Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo

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Tales of the Sinister, Liminal Mushroom https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/tales-of-the-sinister-liminal-mushroom/ Thu, 22 May 2025 11:00:02 +0000 https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/?p=10533 The post Tales of the Sinister, Liminal Mushroom appeared first on Enchanted Living Magazine.

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by Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman

“The dead don’t walk. Except, sometimes, when they do.”
—T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

In recent years, mushrooms have appeared in some very particular realms of speculative literature— horror and the Gothic. It turns out that mushrooms are the perfect vehicle for scary stories. Part of it is their sheer liminality. Despite all of our scientific advancements, we still don’t really understand them. They’re not exactly flora, not exactly fauna, but something entirely different—something that resists categorization.

What cannot be put into tidy boxes quickly becomes fodder for tales of horror. In high-theoretical terms, monsters frighten us because of their “hybridity”—they aren’t quite one thing or another, and the ambiguity is deeply unsettling. This is easy to see with classical monsters like Medusa or Scylla, whose beautiful human bodies are transformed by the addition of snakes or extra heads. Now hybrid composites, they are no longer entirely human, but they’re not animals either. They’ve become monstrous.

Mushrooms, which never fit into a neat category to begin with, are very ready to be made monstrous.

One of our favorite books that explore the sinister potential of the mushroom is T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead, a 2022 retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” As in Poe’s story, the narrator (here named Alex Easton) arrives at the home of their friend Roderick Usher and his sister, Madeline, only to see that the house is falling into ruin. Something is very wrong: While the reason for Madeline’s illness and the house’s decline is never made explicit in Poe’s story, Kingfisher places the blame squarely on the parasitic mushrooms that thrive in the unwholesome landscape. These are mushrooms that can literally move the dead, and when Madeline dies, she’s also reanimated by their power. Remember what we said about hybridity and monstrosity? Madeline becomes part woman, part corpse, mostly mushroom. Eat your heart out, Medusa.

Sylvia Moreno-Garcia’s superb 2020 novel, Mexican Gothic, takes the idea of mushroom-based life extension even further. Like What Moves the Dead, the story begins with our protagonist visiting an old Gothic home and finding it overrun with problematic mushrooms. Noemí, the book’s heroine, goes to check on her cousin Catalina, who has married into the English Doyle family. Noemí quickly realizes that their mansion is overtaken with mold, fungus, and rot, which disgusts her but seems to be weirdly acceptable to the Doyles.

It turns out that the house’s mushrooms have developed a symbiotic but decidedly sinister relationship with the Doyle family. They offer healing properties, but they also seem to sap something vital from the people who dwell in the house.

Eventually, Noemí discovers that the family patriarch, Howard, uses the fungus to grant him an incredibly long life. But what’s much worse is that the mushrooms also grant him dominance and power over all his family members. He has learned to literally take over the consciousnesses and bodies of younger family members through the mushrooms’ power.

So once more, a human fused with mushrooms proves to be bad news. Like the oppressive colonial powers in Mexico to which the Doyle mushrooms are deliberately alluding, it seems like an impossible situation, but Noemí’s solution is both satisfyingly dramatic and extremely warranted.

If you want to explore more sinister mushroom tales, other books that feature them include Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher (2001), Creatures of Want and Ruin by Maggie Tanzer (2018), Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2017), and a collection of short stories entitled Fungi (2012), edited by Orrin Grey and Moreno-Garcia.

But be warned: After reading any of the books mentioned in this article, we doubt you’ll be able to look at a seemingly innocent portobello the same way again.

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The Shimmer of Gold Leaf https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/the-shimmer-of-gold-leaf/ Mon, 17 Jun 2024 10:24:09 +0000 https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/?p=9701 Illuminated manuscripts—handcrafted medieval books—captivate with their vivid colors and intricate details, offering a tangible connection to a time when images were scarce and reproduction was a sacred art.

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Featured Image:
Mérode Altarpiece (1427–32), from the Workshop of Robert Campin

Illuminated manuscripts—books painstakingly copied on parchment and illustrated by hand before the advent of the printing press—are among the most captivating relics of the medieval period.

Designed as they were to conserve wisdom believed eternal and manifest the endurance of religious faith, it’s no surprise that surviving examples can appear less diminished by time than other kinds of medieval art: the colors more vivid, the care invested in each stroke and line of script still unmistakable. Whereas faded frescoes and fractured sculptures can’t help but suggest glories we will never see, illuminated manuscripts seem to present an intact portal, a more immediate grasp of an era on the other side of modernity.

We are accustomed to books being printed by the thousands, if not millions; we take our ceaseless saturation with media and images for granted. At times the screens can feel inescapable

The ease with which we all can put a frame around any aspect of the visible world and reshare it has a paradoxical way of making things sometimes seem more ephemeral and elusive, as if we were inundated with copies and had lost sensitivity to the originals—or as if originality and uniqueness themselves needed always to be proved rather than assumed. Social media posts can rack up massive numbers of views, but the more viral they become, the less they often seem to matter in the long term.

But illuminated manuscripts present us with tangible evidence of a time when images were scarce and copying was a sacred practice. Each repetition of the prescribed words and of the recognized formulas of Christian iconography condensed their power and reaffirmed their apparent timelessness. Compensating for the limited repertoire of texts and images was the depth of feeling and attachment they made

possible: Novelty was trumped by a more consequential continuity. If mechanical reproduction has undermined art’s aura, casting the entire concept of authenticity into doubt, as historian Walter Benjamin theorized, then illuminated manuscripts remind us that the act of reproduction itself once had an intense aura of its own, one that can still speak to the century-spanning force of concentrated attention.

It would seem like the Cloisters would be an ideal place to encounter illuminated manuscripts. Isolated atop a steep hill in one of Manhattan’s more far-flung neighborhoods, the museum was built from the transported remains of several Romanesque and Gothic abbeys, with its arcades and sparsely furnished chambers expressly designed to evoke the solemnity and contemplativeness of the monastic life. Though its collection of medieval manuscripts is not nearly as robust as that of the Morgan Library in Midtown—a Gilded Age faux temple whose ambience Manuscripts is less contemplation than ostentation—the codexes it has on display in a narrow antechamber of its Treasury room benefit from the subdued, intimate atmosphere. The manuscripts feel appropriately rare here, a select few volumes among the other devotional objects, the jeweled vestments and carved ivories.

Book of Hours (1530–35), by Simon Bening Courtesy metmuseum.org
Book of Hours (1530–35), by Simon Bening | Courtesy metmuseum.org

Each of the manuscripts exhibited in that particular nook is a Book of Hours, small and often elaborately ornate breviaries produced for the delectation of the wealthy customers who could afford them. These works conflated piety with bibliophilia, allowing devotion to a beautiful book—fingering its vellum, savoring its miniatures and the shimmer of gold leaf, entangling one’s eyes in the acanthus motifs of its richly decorated borders—to appear equal to devotion to God. Books of Hours made private reading into a kind of soul craft, in which intimacy with a text became the means for personal transfiguration. The book implicitly promised to change your life: It provided instruction on how to imitate the monks and fill your day with effectual prayer, premised on keeping the text with you at all times. To read was to pursue holiness (and not, as would later be the case, idleness).

The ubiquity of texts has since changed our relationship to reading. But we can still glimpse something of how books might have been experienced then in the most famous painting at the Cloisters: the Mérode Altarpiece, from the workshop of Robert Campin. Its style and density of detail are influenced by innovations pioneered in illuminated manuscripts, where new techniques of representing space, volume, and landscape had already been worked out. The central panel depicts the Annunciation, where Mary learns from the angel Gabriel that she will give birth to the son of God. Anachronistically, however, this scene is set in what appears to be a realistically rendered Flemish dining room of the 15th century. Mary is shown reading, as would become conventional in Annunciations, but while she holds one book open by her breast, another sits open on the table, looking very much like an illuminated

manuscript, another anachronism. Some interpreters have suggested she is reading from a Book of Hours, which would be full of prayers devoted to herself—an oddly egotistical choice.

All of this makes for a conceptual jumble of space-time as potentially disorienting as the peculiar, almost proto-Cubist perspective offered of the tabletop. But even though isolated details are rendered with striking fidelity, the overall composition is not intended to be documentary. Not only is the panel full of allegorical flourishes; it also invites a fluid interpretation of time and identity, in which Mary is fully present in all times, as an idea any beholder can aspire to inhabit. Mary reads the book and is the book to be read. The book we read is equivalent to the being we should hope to embody, and it is also at once an open book, and a sacred book, and a message direct from heaven. We can imagine that Mary is reading what Gabriel is simultaneously intimating, and the words change her life and everyone’s. The words are for us as well, preserved across time and out of time in the pages we can almost make out, fluttering impossibly open in some spiritual wind in the stillness.

For medieval people, literate or not, books must have been self-evidently potent, whether they were perched high atop a lectern at an altar or nestled snugly into one’s palm. The early 16th century Book of Hours made by Simon Bening on display at the Cloisters is barely bigger than a matchbox, but all the more entrancing because of it. The curators wisely display the tiny book open to a miniature of The Annunciation to the Shepherds, in which angels appear to announce the nearby birth of the messiah to some flabbergasted sheepherders. One has been knocked to the ground in astonishment, while the other shields his eyes with a gloved hand. For Christians, this image depicts the reverberation of a divine miracle, but for the book’s owner it may also have suggested how privileged they were to hold a miracle in their hands. The image evokes how miraculous seeing itself can be, and I felt myself a witness.

By the time that book was made, printed words and images were already beginning to proliferate in Europe, and the sense that any book could be every book, and every book should be holy, transferring a unified body of spiritual knowledge, began to unwind. Scribes became obsolete, and literacy gradually became more widespread. Books continued to change people’s lives but in ways that were much harder for authorities to control. Their aura may have escaped, but their power was set free with it.

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Ex Libris: Claiming Your Literary Kingdom with Personalized Bookplates https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/ex-libris-claiming-your-literary-kingdom-with-personalized-bookplates/ Thu, 28 Mar 2024 10:25:37 +0000 https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/?p=9509 Discover the timeless tradition of marking your territory in the world of books, from childhood rubber stamps to personalized bookplates. Join author Cara Giles as she reminisces about the thrill of claiming ownership over beloved stories and explores the evolution of book ownership symbols throughout history.

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by Cara Giles
Illustrations by Alice Cao

To my great disappointment, I’ve never claimed a land in the name of Spain. But the Christmas I turned eight, my parents gave me a rubber stamp reading, “This book belongs to Cara,” which felt pretty close to the same thrill. I sat down with an ink pad—the power! —and commenced expanding my kingdom. Stamp—Neverland. Stamp—Oz. Stamp—Narnia. I annexed world after world, feeling the joy of ownership bloom through hardcovers and paperbacks alike. Beside my little bookshelf, I was queen of all I surveyed. I’d already cherished the stories, but now there was permanent, nontoxic proof that they were mine.

I wasn’t the first reader to enjoy marking her territory. Before the advent of rubber stamps, bookplates were the way to go. As early as the 1400s, the super-rich laid claim to their volumes with hand-colored inserts pasted inside. Nobility would flash their coats of arms; monasteries sometimes used symbols like churches and angels. The words Ex Libris, Latin for “from the books of,” often sat above the owner’s name. In those days books were a precious commodity, and if you liked it you had better put a ring on it. To go the extra mile, books were sometimes chained in place: You can’t forget to return what never left the room! Even as books became more readily available and readers loosened their white-knuckle grips on their shelves, people continued using bookplates. As specific books were bought, treasured, sold, and sold again, bookplates could be spackled one on top of another, layers deep like wallpaper in an old house. Hundreds of years later, archivists follow the chains of possession back through time.

Sensibilities changed over the years, and bibliophiles started showcasing their own interests and personalities when they had bookplates designed. Rose Wilder Lane’s bookplates show the novelist at her desk, visualizing a pioneer family. In Sylvia Plath’s bookplates, a woman reads outdoors. Sigmund Freud’s depict a sphinx posing her riddle. Greta Garbo’s bookplates feature a portrait of the starlet with her signature sweeping eyelashes.

In college, I was hardly so sophisticated. I bought used textbooks whenever possible, crossing out previous owners’ names and scribbling in my own. But textbooks felt like business, while fiction was always a joyous escape. When one of my English department friends had her first child, I ordered a set of color-drenched bookplates customized with her baby’s name and a tiny fairy in a garden.

My own daughters came years later, a scant fourteen months apart. I barely had time to shower, let alone read, as the toddler years tore through our house. But children grow, and in due time they stopped gumming board books. Their shelves filled in with Beatrix Potter and Winnie the Pooh, Fancy Nancy and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I hunted through thrift stores for unusual vintage titles.

My four- and five-year-olds were by my side one day when, books already in the shopping cart, I paused to look through a shelf of craft supplies. I snatched a rubber stamp, my eyes bugging out at our good luck. “From the Library of:” floated across the bottom in elegant script, with a dotted line ready for personalization. A Pegasus reared up in the foreground. Billowing clouds marked the path to a fairy-tale castle, and stars shone overhead.

“This is very special,” I told my girls. “We can stamp this inside your books, write your names, and everyone will know they belong to you.” I’d write their names across the known and imagined universe, given half the chance. The worlds I’d loved, signed over like so many deeds in indelible, archival ink. Ex Libris, little readers. I claim these books in your name.

Cara Giles is a fantasy writer living in southern Utah with her husband and daughters. In between library visits, she’s penning new stories to share. Follow artist Alice Cao on Instagram @alicecaoillustration.

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Book Excerpt: A Year In The Enchanted Garden https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/book-excerpt-a-year-in-the-enchanted-garden/ Wed, 28 Feb 2024 12:35:17 +0000 https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/?p=9390 The post Book Excerpt: A Year In The Enchanted Garden appeared first on Enchanted Living Magazine.

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I wrote A Year in the Enchanted Garden: Cultivating the Witch’s Soul With Spells, Crafts & Garden Know-How, my new book from Llewellyn, to inspire you to discover the true enchantment of a garden (big or small), to get your hands dirty and learn to work with the rhythms of nature in your own specific region, and to get to know the spirits of your land.

I invite you to tap into energy that is unique to your own magic with gardening tips, stories, recipes, charms and spells, herbal folklore, and seasonal celebrations for every month.

This is your invitation to stroll through the garden gate and down a stony path. Sit beneath the willow; she whispers eloquent tales of a witch (like you, like me) weaving magic with a green-tipped wand. Never mind the dirt stains under the witch’s fingernails; she finds solace in the company of growing things. Here is an excerpt:

Here We Go A-Wassailing

In northwestern Washington, winters can be particularly dreary. We have known people who have moved to our beautiful valley during the summer and by September declared, “The rain isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” We chuckle at their naïveté and say, “Just wait until November.” Where I am, in eastern Skagit County, the mountains that surround us trap the clouds, so we can sometimes go months without a break in the weather. By the time spring arrives, we open our doors bleary-eyed and suspicious of the big, bright round thing that dominates an unfamiliar blue sky.

One particularly cold, soggy January afternoon, after weeks of continual drizzle, my five-year-old daughter said to me, “Mama, can’t we just shoo it away so the sun will come back?”

I smiled and then said, “I wish I had a spell to make it disappear.”

She went back to playing with her dolls and had soon forgotten all about the gray dampness that kept her indoors, but it got me thinking about rituals meant to scare away the winter and encourage the arrival of spring. I knew all about the carnival celebrations that would be happening in February; their pre-Christian roots began with festivals to usher in the spring. But the ritual I was most interested in was the mid-January ceremony known as wassail.

Long, long, ago, British people set out in small groups, sometimes led by a wassail king and queen, into the bitter cold of a January evening. This would typically take place on the eve of Twelfth Night, January 5 or January 17, depending on which calendar was used. As they walked down the winding paths that led to their orchards, they banged drums and rang bells to frighten away winter spirits. Along with them they brought a special brew of cider or beer that had been prepared with herbs, sugar, spices, eggs, and cream. Typically, they surrounded the oldest fruit-bearing tree, chanted rhymes, and sang songs to wake up the spirit of the tree. In some traditions, the trunk of the tree was beaten with a stick to get the sap moving. As an offering, pieces of dried bread would be dunked into the wassail bowl, and the elected queen would place them in the hollow or supporting branches of the tree. Some of the wassail brew would then be poured about the roots or upon the tree’s trunk, and the revelers shared the rest.

Photo by ALEXANDRIA CORNE @alexandriacornephotography 2
Photo by ALEXANDRIA CORNE @alexandriacornephotography 2

It was that very evening that my daughter, Chloe, who was rightly elected queen, and my sons, Joshua, age twelve, and Elijah, age nine, followed me down a winding path, equipped with apple cider and some bells, to our small orchard. As we walked, we shook our bells and cried out, “Go away, winter! Ye have been banished!”

The kids ran circles around the gnarly old apple tree that produced the smallest and knobbiest apples you can imagine. “Wake up, wake up!” they screeched and jingled their bells. Chloe, taking her role of elected queen very seriously, ceremoniously dunked toasted bread into our wassail bowl and tucked it into the crook of one of the lower branches. “Here you go, nature spirits,” she said. “I hope this helps you wake up and make all this rain go away.”

We sang what verses we could remember from that old carol “Here We Come A-Wassailing,” then spilled a little of the wassail onto the roots of the old tree before sharing the rest among ourselves. “Here’s to a good try, old friend,” I said and raised the bowl. Of course, after taking a big swig from our wassail bowl, Joshua had to spray the contents from his mouth all over the tree’s trunk.

“Joshie!” Chloe screamed and started hitting him with her bells.

“I was just blessing the tree,” he said, blocking her blows with a now sloshing bowl of apple cider. This statement threw my nine-year-old into a fit of laughter, to which Chloe responded with a set of bells between his eyes.

“It’s time to go in,” I said as calmly as I could. I watched as my three little witchlings ran screaming and laughing back to the house, and then I turned toward the tree. “I know you get it,” I said and patted the twisted trunk. “Blessed be, dear spirit.”

Planting Your Bare-Root Tree

Bare-root trees and shrubs are typically available to buy at your local nursery between January and March. What’s great about buying bare-root plants is that it is an easy and affordable way to add fruit-bearing or flowering trees and shrubs to a new garden. Also, most bare-root trees sold are typically a dwarf or semi-dwarf variety, so spacing isn’t as big of an issue as it would be were you to purchase a standard-size tree.

When to plant your bare-root tree will vary from region to region, but ideally you want to plant trees when they are still dormant. In warmer regions, that means late fall to early winter. In colder regions, just after the ground has thawed.

When you are ready to plant your bare root tree or shrub …

• Take off the protective packaging and gently untangle root system.

• Soak in water for approximately three to six hours.

• Dig a hole that is at least double the size of the root spread. Break up the sides of the hole to accommodate growth.

• Mix equal parts garden soil and good compost and partly fill in the hole.

• Place the tree in the hole and fill soil in around the roots. Make sure the root collar (where the roots meet the base of the tree) is level with the ground. Pack the soil in well.

• Build up the soil a little around the tree to form a water basin and give your tree a good watering.

• Cover a three-foot-wide and two-inch-deep area around the base of your tree with mulch to hold in moisture.

• Water every seven to ten days until the tree is well established.

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Winter Witch Issue by Enchanted Living Magazine - The Year of the Witch 2023 #65Enchanted Living is a quarterly print magazine that celebrates all things enchanted. 
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Salt & Broom by Sharon Lynn Fisher – Witchy Retelling of Jane Eyre https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/salt-broom-by-sharon-lynn-fisher-witchy-retelling-of-jane-eyre/ Fri, 08 Dec 2023 12:47:20 +0000 https://enchantedlivingmagazine.com/?p=9153 The post Salt & Broom by Sharon Lynn Fisher – Witchy Retelling of Jane Eyre appeared first on Enchanted Living Magazine.

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How lovely is this new tome from Sharon Lynn Fisher, Salt & Broom, a witchy retelling of Jane Eyre?

Or, as Sharon puts it, “Jane Eyre, but make it witchy”! Yes.


Here are a few words from Sharon about the book:

The publication of Salt & Broom by 47North this month represents a dream come true for me. The novel is a witchy retelling of Jane Eyre, which is the book I consider to be my gateway classic. Before Jane Eyre, I didn’t believe I enjoyed classics. But a friend recommended the book (some 30 years ago), saying “trust me,” and after that I was on to the other Brontes, Austen, Eliot, Shelley, Trollope, and many more.

I’m not sure exactly what made me fall in love with the original. I think I identified with Jane herself, though we were born worlds apart. She was an outsider, felt small, and described herself as plain – I felt much the same growing up. She felt connected to the supernatural, and in fact Rochester is constantly (playfully) accusing her of being a witch or fairy. I loved that aspect, along with the gothic vibes, and as an adult fantasy author, I got to thinking how wonderful it could be if the book actually had supernatural elements. I had been wanting for some time to write a witchy book, too, so it all came together perfectly.

A number of readers have mentioned in reviews that it was brave to take on a Jane Eyre retelling, and until seeing those it hadn’t occurred to me that such an endeavor was risky. It should have. The book is near and dear to many people’s hearts, after all. But once the story began to spin itself in my mind, there was simply no stopping it. I’m incredibly grateful that so many readers have connected with my witchy Jane.

Author Sharon Lynn Fisher and her newest book Salt & Broom, a witch retelling of the classic Jane Eyre

And here’s the prologue:

(Edward Fairfax Rochester)

Thornfield Hall, North of England—October 1, 1847

Nearly midday, and still I tarried at my bedchamber writing desk, gazing out over the grounds of my ancestral home. Beneath the window, a maid dug quick fingers into the rich soil of the kitchen garden, harvesting some variety of root vegetable that would no doubt make its way to the dinner board. Her birdlike voice lifted to the window as she spoke with Thornfield’s cook, the earthier-toned Mrs. Glenn, who stood closer to the house and out of view.

Off to the northeast, where the great oak wood wrapped around one corner of the estate, crows jagged and dived like my own unquiet thoughts, harrying the gilded treetops. Beyond the wood, and in all other directions, stretched rolling green hills and swaths of fading-purple heath. Bruised-looking clouds hung oppressively over all.

The nearest village was Hay, but the orientation of my bedchamber gave me no view of it; Thornfield might have been the only house for miles.

The estate came to me from my father, Osborne, and to Osborne from his father, and so on in an unbroken line all the way back to the first Rochester, who had married into it in the sixteenth century. Since the death of my father, I’d been the sole Rochester upon the place, except for the very brief period when there’d been a mistress of Thornfield.

If I continued in my procrastination, I might very well find myself the only soul still haunting the old hall by Christmas.

Sighing, I gazed down at my littered desk. I gathered up the crumpled, half-written sheets; carried them to the fireplace; and tossed them in, watching as they bloomed and hissed into yellow flame. I’d meant to complete this task days ago but had so far found it impossible to word a request for a thing I simply did not believe existed.

Yet I must do something. Else the servants would certainly desert me, and I could hardly blame them. For myself, I cared little if the old place fell derelict, but they deserved better. Thornfield’s tenants deserved better. And I had a duty to my father to preserve the estate—though at this rate I might very well be the last Rochester to inhabit it.

Blast.

I returned to the desk, sank down, and took out a clean sheet of paper. With a long breath for clarity of thought, I dipped my pen into the inkwell and wrote with determination. When I lifted nib from paper, I did not read what I’d written but quickly blotted the letter, then folded it and applied my seal, addressing it finally to Mr. Simon Brocklehurst of Lowood School in Lancashire.

Beautiful illustration in Salt & Broom, the newest book from author Sharon Lynn Fisher.

The post Salt & Broom by Sharon Lynn Fisher – Witchy Retelling of Jane Eyre appeared first on Enchanted Living Magazine.

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