Review: The Lighthouse Witches

3 stars. This is a fun one - mystery, thriller, horror all wrapped up in an easy box with a supernatural bow. While I think maybe there were too many threads woven into the tapestry, it still illustrates a pretty entertaining picture at the end of the day. I loved the folklore angle and the setting, and the twists and turns kept me paying attention.

The core of it involves Liv Stay and her three daughters, who arrive in a small
Scottish town in 1998 so Liv can paint a mural in the local historical lighthouse. The town is welcoming enough and strongly superstitious - which makes sense considering all the strange events involving missing and reappearing children that happen there. In 2021, one of the daughters is forced to reconcile with her past and is drawn back to try to sort through it all. There’s also a grimoire, witchy neighbors, dodgy locals, a cave, a shark. runes, a cute plasterer with hunches, and a mysterious lighthouse owner. And pop tarts.

I don’t know quite how to explain this, but I wish it went darker. There are some really dark elements but they don’t really land in a disturbing way… like, it tries to be dark, and there are some graphic moments, but I just wanted to pat the book on its head and say that’s adorable, bless your heart. Which is saying something, because the Scottish witch trials exemplify the darkest, blackest, most awful damage humanity can inflict upon itself. I dunno, the stakes just never felt super high, and there were so many things going on.

So many things: a lot of characters, and subplots, and entanglements; relationships to remember and interactions to keep track of. Some of the details were great, some of them felt superfluous. I’m not convinced the teenagers were written realistically (a very hard thing to be fair), but the kids were pretty cute.

Overall, I liked it. I enjoyed the mystery aspect the most, and I’d love to check out more by this author, who clearly knows her way around an intriguing premise / puzzle. This would make a great beach read.

The Lighthouse Witches on: Amazon | Bookshop.org | Goodreads