What are his motives? What’s he trying to do? What is his aim? And finally, her utter helplessness when trying to save Alice. Combined with this, is the creeping suspicion of her husband. The abject terror at having something so personal so utterly out of her control. Fleetwood’s anguish was palpable – her fear at losing her child, what this would mean to her as a wife, but also as a mother. There were two things I loved about this book.įirstly, the despair – and I don’t mean this is a heartless way at all I love to be moved by a book. Alice promises to help her give birth to a healthy baby, and to prove the physician wrong. Then she crosses paths by chance with Alice Gray, a young midwife. When Fleetwood finds a letter she isn’t supposed to read from the doctor who delivered her third stillbirth, she is dealt the crushing blow that she will not survive another pregnancy. But as the mistress at Gawthorpe Hall, she still has no living child, and her husband Richard is anxious for an heir. The place time, and characters are real, though the story is one of Halls’ own – a tale of two women’s fight for freedom in an age of oppression, subjugation and superstition.įleetwood Shuttleworth is 17 years old, married, and pregnant for the fourth time. The Familiars is an evocative, haunting tale, set upon the backdrop of seventeenth-century industrial Lancashire, and the loosely based on the folklore of the Pendle witches. The ‘familiar’ title (I’m so sorry) let me know the subject matter would be up my street, and the blurb reinforced my decision to pop the book in my shopping basket. I was drawn to the striking full cover wrap, the slinky fox and personal artefacts hiding amongst moonlit trees. The Constant Nymph, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and The Unforgotten all found their way onto my book shelf because I fell in love with their covers. I’m sure there are books out there with beautiful covers and stinking interiors, but so far this method has worked fairly well for me. I regularly pick up a book because I am drawn to the cover artwork – admittedly, I will always check out the blurb too, and if I like the sound of it as well I will normally buy. The old saying goes you should never judge a book by its cover, but I have to confess, that I often do – and it actually normally works out in my favour.

“The ghosts of things that never happened are worse than the ghosts of things that did.”― L.M.

The familiars book review