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Lyndsey Gollogly (2893 KP) rated The Black Candle in Books

May 18, 2024  
TB
The Black Candle
Catherine Cookson | 2024
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
99 of 220
Book
The Black Candle
By Catherine Cookson
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Bridget Dean Mordaunt was a woman of consequence in her own part of the world. Inheriting her father's businesses at the age of nineteen, by the time she was twenty-three in 1880, she was running them as confidently as any man. Yet the path destiny required her to follow was not an easy one. Her feckless cousin Victoria became infatuated with Lionel Filmore, the fortune-hunting elder son of an old but impoverished family living in the decayed grandeur of Grove House. Bridget had no illusions about Lionel, but Victoria's happiness was paramount to her. So a pattern began to form that would shape the lives of generations to come, a pattern of some good and some great evil, but all of it inexorably linking Bridget ever more closely with the Filmores and their house.

Catherine Cooksons books always bring out the emotions a whole range and this one does it best from sympathy to anger with some tears thrown in. This is one of my favourites.
  
40x40

ClareR (6256 KP) rated Sycorax in Books

Nov 16, 2025 (Updated Nov 16, 2025)  
Sycorax
Sycorax
Nydia Hetherington | 2025 | Fiction & Poetry, Paranormal, Science Fiction/Fantasy
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
I've seen The Tempest, and so I was interested to see an origin story for Sycorax - the most powerful witch of Algiers. Except she isn't the evil monster that Shakespeare has written about. In this story, she is a child, a girl and a young woman. A young woman who knows too much and is too different to the others in her village, protected by her parents up until the point where they are no longer able to protect her.
I love the way in this is written - it's lyrical with a nod to the style of Shakespeare, Nydia Hetherington gives a reason for Sycorax's differences: her physical difference is due to illness and injury, her witch qualities are due to the fact that she simply knows too much for a woman in a time where women shouldn't have known anything beyond childbirth, motherhood and housework.
And then there's the element of magic that runs throughout the novel - which is always a winner as far as I'm concerned. A really enjoyable novel.