I needed a new book to read for Autumn so I chose The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells. Autumn to me means cosy blankets, cold mornings, witches, Halloween, pumpkins, and beautiful colours. This book was a perfect way to enter the "Ber" months and Greenlaw really manages to capture the essence of the season. The writing was haunting, yet whimsical, the setting atmospheric yet cosy, the characters familiar yet intriguing. I think this is probably one of my favourite reads this year and I think it might just need to be reread every year. There are beautiful elements of love and loss mixed in with the fantastical mythical mountains. I love nothing more than a forbidden romance and this story did not disappoint. I was worried that Greenlaw was going to make Carrie get back together with her childhood sweetheart but I am so grateful that she didn't. I would like to point out that although the story does take some time to get going in the beginning, this is a book worth sticking with because it is all so worth it in the end. If you love stories such as Practical Magic, please read this, you will not be disappointed.

I loved Rachel's previous book, One Christmas Morning so I was over the moon to get the chance to read her next book. The Woodsmoke Womne's Book of Spells does not disappoint. A gorgeous magical and mysterious book, a perfect fall read. I love how Rachel describes everything, it's so visual, from the mountains to the small town, you actually feel like you are there.
Thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this eARC.

I loved this book, it was a cozy mystery and kept me interested all the way through and I was completely satisfied with the ending

Carrie returns to her home town of Woodsmoke ten years after leaving her fiancé Tom at the altar when she is left a home and business in her grandmother's will. She finds little has changed in the small mountain town, particularly with her great aunt Cora who still has the family spell book and lives by the belief that the mountains look over the town and must be respected.

When Carrie meets a handsome stranger in the mountains Cora is convinced he's Fae folk and will vanish at the end of winter. But Carrie is besotted and falls under his spell nonetheless. Tom and his wife Jess have kept their distance since Carrie returned but they may be the only ones that can save her...

This was a gorgeous story for reading on a wet autumn day with candles lit, and living in a town surrounded by mountains, with myths and legends about the hills, I really enjoyed this atmospheric tale of small town life.

What an amazing little cosy book The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells is! Perfect to curl up with this cosy season or any cosy season for that matter. The little town of Woodsmoke was deeply and richly described, and you could instantly picture the beautiful landscape described in the book along with the mountains. Superstition and magic, folklore and tales from old fill this book and keep you guessing till the very end. Praise for Rachel Greenlaw for writing such an amazing magical book.

Loved this! The folklore captures the imagination! Does magic truly exist? Well it certainly seems to in Woodsmoke! The narrative keeps you gripped as it's told from three perspectives (all women from Woodsmoke). Is the stranger magically going to disappear as soon as the frost melts and leave behind a broken heart? I don't want to give the storyline away but it is well worth a read and definitely a book to curl up with.
Will be looking out for more from Rachel in the future. Many thanks to the publishers and to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read this.

I enjoyed this book. The setting descriptions were really well written and I loved the folklore of the mountains. Recommended.

Thank you netgalley, HQ, HarperCollins and Rachel Greenlaw for providing me with an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I wanted to read this book the second I saw it compared to The Unmaking of June Farrow. I actually wish I hadn’t seen this comparison before reading as this set me up for high high expectations.

That said this was a wonderful, thought provoking read. With beautiful atmospheric descriptions of the location and characters. The book is told from 3 characters perspectives, all the women of a small town called Woodsmoke (hence the title). I found myself changing my opinion of each character as the story progressed. I enjoyed the flash backs to the past and getting to know the love story between Cora and Howard (by far the best love story in this book)- this made Cora’s character more likeable but still I struggled with the chapters in her perspective.

I liked the folklore and magical elements in the book but I found myself wishing for more. The book is a little simple (and I don’t necessarily mean that negatively) but for me I was expecting more depth and development than there was, and I feel there was real scope for it to be a more tragic and heartbreaking story, the death of characters and loss of years spent together just didn’t seem to bring out the emotion in the way I would have expected.

This is a perfect cosy read for the autumn/winter months with a wonderful story about magical folklore, family, love and finding where you belong in the world.

Thanks for an eARC of this book.

I loved the premise and was super excite to read it but the pace was sligtly too slow for me. I was 40% through the book before I felt like the story really picked up. It was a good read, definitely one for an autumn day but perhaps not the read for me.

The Woodsmoke Women’s Book of Spells by Rachel Greenlaw is a captivating and magical novel. After 10 years away, Carrie Morgan returns to Woodsmoke, the small town where she grew up and a place full of superstitions about the surrounding mountains.

Over the years the female members of Carrie’s family have recorded the tales of these mysterious mountains in a book that is passed from Grandmother to Granddaughter. The Morgan’s also protect their community from the dangers of mountains but it always comes with a price.

This book was such an enjoyable read, I was expecting The Gilmore Girls meets Practical Magic, but it was so much more, with the themes of homecoming, family and female relationships, handled in an honest and relatable way.

I’m reluctant to write much more as I don’t want to give too much away, the beauty of this book and Greenlaw’s writing is how she skilfully reveals aspects of the plot, leaving you unable to put the book down. However if you’re looking for an atmospheric autumnal page turner that features an enigmatic stranger who arrives with the frost this is the book for you.

Thank-you HQ and NetGalley for is ARC.

I was completely captivated by this book from Rachel Greenlaw. I initially expected a cozy, witchy read but was delighted to find it delving into much darker themes. The story masterfully explores the weight of curses, the sacrifices tied to magic, and the strain on fractured relationships. The pacing strikes a perfect balance—steady without ever dragging—allowing the intricate characters and their complexities to shine. The haunting, atmospheric setting, with its looming mountains and ever-present sense of foreboding, added an extra layer of depth that I loved. An unexpectedly immersive and beautifully crafted tale.

Atmospheric read between magic and reality

I really enjoyed this book. The women and their relationships, the way everything is rooted in nature and the seasons, the way the author, Rachel Greenlaw, keeps you guessing until the very last page!

Set in a small town near the mountains, this novel is both about the relationships between the female characters, through whose eyes it is told, and the Morgan family's history with the mountains and the magic they believe to be there. A mysterious stranger appears, just as to several generations before the current one, and it is impossible to tell whether he is real or not.

There is a lot going on in this book but the author skillfully weaves all the threads and plot lines together. The atmospheric setting and descriptions are the cherry on top. It's a very cosy, somewhat wild read, perfect for autumn or winter!

Highly recommend if you are into herblore and magic, family mysteries and curses and complicated bonds between women both family and not!

A genuine pleasure to read. Thank you for this ARC copy, it hit just the spot for a warming, hysterical, witchy easy-read. I know a few people I could easily recommend this too!

LOVE LOVE LOVEDDDDDDD THIS BOOK!

no more needs to be said! Defo going to buy the physical of this I enjoyed that muchb

This is the first book i have read from Rachel Greenlaw and will be looking out for more of her books in the future.

The sleepy town of Woodsmoke nestles under the watchful mountains. Legend says to be careful as the mountains take people and never return them. Aswell as send mysterious strangers at the first frost only for them to leave when the frost thaw.

The Morgan family have live in Woodsmoke for centuries and Legend tells of a book of spells that is handed down from Grandmothers to Granddaughters through this family.
Carrie Morgan left Woodsmoke ten years ago and has been summoned back when her grandmother dies and leaves in her will her cottage and shop.
She starts renovating the old cottage ready to sell it only to start falling in love with the place again.
A lovley mystical love story

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.

wow what a book!
i absolutely devoured this i couldn’t put it down. and loved the stiorybthe settling and the characters.
it was a magical tale with loads of twists that has you gasping out loud.
loved it!!

Family secrets, magic, fresh starts and old entanglements all combine and combust when Carrie Morgan returns home after a ten year absence to rennovate her grandmother's cottage. Slow, dreamily written, multi pov and atmospheric this wasn't quite the supernatural fantasy I was expecting but something more rooted in place, nature and superstition as Carrie and the reader struggle to work out what is real and what, if anything, is supernatural. An interesting read.

Lovely and cozy just want I needed and wanted. It captivated me from the first chapter with its magical vibes. There were some heavy themes which was handled well within the story. Overall great read. Thank you

A story of strong women and a strong community interwoven with some sort of magic- perhaps?
Morgan women from Woodsmoke are witches, or so their community believe. Certainly there are some strange goings on...bargains with the mountains, herbs at the threshold and a general air of mystery as people make deals with nature via a Morgan to get their hearts desire.
At first a little skeptical as to whether I would enjoy the book I was actually drawn into Woodsmoke very quickly and the magical elements of the story are written to enhance rather than to hammer home all things witch.
Beautifully and intricately woven with nice throwbacks to previous generations of Morgan women to solidify the mystique.