🌙 The Witchling Shelf

✍️ Author: C.J. Cooke

🔮 First Impressions:
The book opens with fog and folklore, instantly unsettling in that delicious way where you’re not quite sure if you’re reading a ghost story, a time slip, or a whispered curse. It pulled me in like a tide—slow and strange and deeply magnetic.

✨ Mood:
Driftwood altars, storm-swept cliffs, witch-marks on stone, secrets steeped in brine

🍵 Tea Pairing:
Seaweed green tea with a drop of honey—earthy, saline, and just a little uncanny

🕯️ Spell Notes:
"We are the daughters of the storm, and we remember."

📚 Progress:
🖤 Started: 02 July 2025
🖤 Finished: 06 July 2025
🖤 Pages turned by candlelight: with salt on my skin and something ancient at my back

💭 Reflections:
This is a novel built on layers: present-day mystery, 17th-century witch trials, missing girls, and the way trauma echoes through bloodlines. The atmospheric writing absolutely shines—Cooke has a gift for making you feel the landscape, the chill, the ache of something just out of reach.

The shifting timelines and points of view are ambitious and mostly well-handled, though I occasionally found myself needing to pause and orient. The heart of the novel—mothers, daughters, and the legacy of belief—beats strong beneath the folklore and fear.

There are moments where the horror flickers too close, and others where it feels more speculative than supernatural—but that tension is part of the book’s haunting charm. A gothic lighthouse tale with teeth, tenderness, and a strange sort of hope in its bones.

Not flawless, but deeply compelling. It left salt in the corners of my heart.