October Book Club - Theme: WITCHES --- VOTE NOW!!!

October's Theme is inspired by one of my favorite movies of all time -- The Witches of Eastwick. The film was actually an adaptation of a John Updike book, but I cannot read Updike's writing, lol. So we will read other books about witches (and the women who played them), perfect for the month of October! Most of these will have a bit of magic in them, low fantasy, so be prepared to suspend your disbelief!

CAST YOUR SPELL (I mean, your VOTE) in the comments below before September's book club meeting. There, we will announce the official selection. I've added the Amazon links for your further research as well as uploaded the book covers to photos for you to view.

And the nominees are.

1. 'CHER: A Memoir Part One' by Cher - Before her role as Alex in The Witches of Eastwick, Cher had a remarkable career on stage. After more than seventy years of fighting to live her life on her own terms, Cher finally reveals her true story in intimate detail, in a two-part memoir. Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. She is a lifelong activist and philanthropist. As a dyslexic child who dreamed of becoming famous, Cher was raised in often-chaotic circumstances, surrounded by singers, actors, and a mother who inspired her in spite of their difficult relationship.
With her trademark honesty and humor, Cher: The Memoir traces how this diamond in the rough succeeded with no plan and little confidence to become the trailblazing superstar the world has been unable to ignore for more than half a century. AMAZON LINK

2. 'The Witch's Daughter: My Mother, Her Madness, and the Magic That Bound Us' by Orenda Fink - Indie musician Orenda Fink’s lyrical and moving memoir about growing up with a mother who battled mental illness and addiction. Each night, Orenda Fink’s darkly charismatic mother perches on a kitchen stool and insists that she and Orenda are magic. Orenda’s mother claims to be a witch who uses her magic to protect the family from the outside world, but Orenda’s childhood is marked by instability and uncertainty. Her family moves from town to town, chasing a fresh start whenever the money runs out. Orenda escapes to pursue a music career. The magic she finds in her music feels precious and rare, while the magic her mother wields feels increasingly volatile. Orenda orbits the family home, always drawn back by her mother’s dark powers. With the guidance of a Jungian psychotherapist, Orenda is stunned to learn that her mother fits the criteria associated with borderline personality disorder, including a subtype known as “The Witch”—an aggressive, dominating figure who operates by fear-driven control, sometimes claiming to wield magic. Told in spellbinding prose, this is a memoir of music, self-discovery, and compassion. AMAZON LINK

3. 'Practical Magic' by Alice Hoffman - Adapted into a film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman (can't wait for Practical Magic 2!) this is the story of the Owen Sisters confronting the challenges of life and love. For more than 200 years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally have endured that fate as well: as children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their musty house and their exotic concoctions and their crowd of black cats. But all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape. One will do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they share will bring them back—almost as if by magic... Note: This book is part of a series, but this was the first book published the others are prequels and sequels. AMAZON LINK

4. 'The Antidote' by Karen Russell - a gripping dust bowl epic about 5 characters whose fates become entangled after a storm. The story opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate -- above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. AMAZON LINK

5. 'The Bewitching' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Three women in three different eras encounter danger and witchcraft in this eerie multigenerational saga. Inspired by her grandmother's stories, Minerva has become a graduate student focused on the history of horror literature and is researching the life of Beatrice Tremblay, an obscure author of macabre tales. In the course of assembling her thesis, Minerva uncovers information that reveals that Tremblay’s most famous novel, The Vanishing, was inspired by a true story: Decades earlier, during the Great Depression, Tremblay attended the same university where Minerva is now studying and became obsessed with her beautiful and otherworldly roommate, who then disappeared under mysterious circumstances. As Minerva descends ever deeper into Tremblay’s manuscript, she begins to sense that the malign force that stalked Tremblay and the missing girl might still walk the halls of the campus. These disturbing events also echo the stories Nana Alba told about her girlhood in 1900s Mexico, where she had a terrifying encounter with a witch. AMAZON LINK

6. 'The Hounding' by Xenobe Purvis - The Crucible meets The Virgin Suicides in this haunting debut about five sisters in a small village in 18th-century England whose neighbors are convinced they’re turning into dogs. Even before the rumors about the Mansfield girls begin, Little Nettlebed is a village steeped in the uncanny, from strange creatures that wash up on the riverbank to portentous ravens gathering on the roofs of people about to die. The truth is that the inhabitants of Little Nettlebed have never much liked the Mansfield girls. As the rotating perspectives of five villagers quickly make clear, now is no exception. Even if local belief in witchcraft is waning, an aversion to difference is as widespread as ever, and these conflicting narratives all point to the same ultimate conclusion: A richly atmospheric parable of the pleasures and perils of female defiance, The Hounding considers whether in any age it might be safer to be a dog than an unusual young girl. AMAZON LINK

7. 'Weyward' by Emilia Hart - A historical fiction novel told in three timelines. 2019: Under the cover of darkness, Kate flees London for ramshackle Weyward Cottage, inherited from a great-aunt she barely remembers. But she suspects that her great-aunt had a secret. One that lurks in the bones of the cottage, hidden ever since the witch-hunts of the 17th century. 1619: Altha is awaiting trial for the murder of a local farmer. When Altha was a girl, her mother taught her their magic, a kind not rooted in spell casting but in a deep knowledge of the natural world. But unusual women have always been deemed dangerous, and as the evidence of witchcraft is laid out against Altha, she knows it will take all her powers to maintain her freedom. 1942: As World War II rages, Violet is trapped in her family's grand, crumbling estate. The only traces Violet has of her mother are a locket bearing the initial W and the word weyward scratched into the baseboard of her bedroom. Weaving together the stories of three extraordinary women across five centuries is an enthralling novel of female resilience. AMAZON LINK

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