There is an old tale woven through the mountain town of Woodsmoke about a stranger who appears as the first snow falls in winter, who will disappear without a trace as the frost thaws in spring, leaving a broken heart behind.
Carrie Morgan ran from Woodsmoke ten years ago, and the decision has haunted her ever since. Spending a decade painting and drifting around Europe, she tries to forget her family’s legacy and the friends she left behind. But the Morgan women have always been able to harness the power of the mountains surrounding the town, and their spells—and curses—are sewn into the soil. The mountains, they say, never forget.
Sure enough, when Carrie’s grandmother dies and leaves behind her dilapidated cottage, she returns to renovate—certain she will only be there for one winter. She meets Matthieu as the temperature dips, a newcomer who offers to help refurbish the cottage. Before long, and despite warnings from her great-aunt Cora of the old stories, Carrie finds herself falling for the charming stranger. But when the frost thaws in spring, Matthieu goes missing.
Carrie is convinced he’s real, and he’s in danger. As she fights her way across the mountains to find him, she must confront all the reasons why she left Woodsmoke and decide whether the place she’s spent the last decade running from is the home she’s been searching for.
This book ended up being… not quite what I was expecting. The comp’s to Gilmore Girls and Practical Magic made me expect a small town, mystical style novel, with some sort of sinister underbelly and, although there were definitely some parts of that woven through, the story as a whole just fell a little flat for me.
Told from the POV’s of three women who call/called Woodsmoke home, Carrie, Jess and Cora. Carrie was supposed to be the next of the Morgan women who have called Woodsmoke their home for centuries, using a book passed down through the generations to keep the town safe. But an event from her past saw her running away from that life, and how she has only returned to fulfill her grandmothers wishes. She is someone who has never found somewhere she belongs, a place she can really call home, and someone to share it with. Jess, Carrie’s once best friend, whose life has seemingly now been turned upside down since her return. The pair used to be inseparable, almost like sisters, but then Carrie left without a word, and ten years passed, ten years that saw them both become different people. And finally Cora, Carrie’s great-aunt, and the current Morgan women who keeps the town safe. She is someone who was dealt with loss, not just from Carrie leaving, but the price she pays for protecting the town from the mysterious mountains.
These three characters all had individual, distinctive voices, but I felt the telling of their stories, the choppiness with which it flicks between past and present tense, didn’t really help to create that bond that I look for when reading a story like this. A story that is very character driven, very character heavy, and although I did empathise with them in parts, for the majority I struggled to care for them and their plights.
The writing was prosaic and lyrical, extremely beautiful, but annoying in the way it replicated itself. The author used one paragraph to describe something, an emotion, an event, a tree, and then the next one followed with the same thing, just using different words. It was almost like she felt the need to get as much descriptive language in there as she could, and a lot of it just felt like filler words, they didn’t really add anything to the story, and I did find myself skipping through some of the bigger passages of inner monologue or descriptions just because of how repetitive they got. That being said, Greenlaw knows how to create an atmosphere, and despite it missing the sinister feeling I expected going in, she really brings to life Woodsmoke and the surrounding mountains. A place shrouded in mystery, where the people laugh at the Morgan women, whilst sneaking to their house under the cover of dark asking for their help.
The plot itself ended up being quite simple, which is maybe why I didn’t end up loving it. I’m not saying it’s a bad story, it’s not. It’s a story filled with grief, with characters longing to belong, and one that shows the price the Morgan women have to pay for their power. But it isn’t much beyond that, and I wanted more. From the start the mountains are shown as this mysterious being, something to be feared, something that can lure in even the wariest of townspeople never to be seen again, but we never really see any of this in the story. In fact, there is very little magic at all. Everything ends up having a more mundane reasoning behind it, which just made it feel a little flat for me. I found myself reading, hoping that something would rear it’s head and show it’s teeth, something more dangerous than simple mountains in winter, but we didn’t really get much more than that. There are things eluded to from the past, especially with Cora’s POV, but nothing for us to dig our teeth into in the present.
All in all this ended up being a bit of a meh read for me. If you don’t mind a simpler story, one where everything kind of sits at face value, then I would recommend giving this a go. I guess, especially from the comp’s, I just expected something else going in, and was disappointed when it never showed up.
