The Friday 56 – The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson

The Friday 56 is a weekly meme hosted over at Freda’s Voice. The rules are simple and go something like this.

1. Grab a book, any book.
2. Turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader (If you have to improvise, that’s ok.)
3. Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it)
4. Post it.
5. Add the post URL, not your blog URL, to the Linky.
6. Tweet it #Friday56 (not an official Freda’s Voice rule)

Hello, hello, hello! For reason, over the last few months I’ve been reading mostly horror and not as a warm up to read all things spooky in October. I’ve just had a craving for horror and weirdly enough that craving has yet to wane. This month I participated in and was a co-host for the Black-Oween Readathon. It’s a readathon to celebrate Black authors that write horror, thriller, and mystery.

One of my reads was The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson. It’s a solid 3 – 3.5⭐️ for me. It has good bones, but there was something about it that just didn’t draw me in the way I had hoped. There is a second book coming out and I am excited to see what happens.

In the frescoes painted across the cathdral’s vaulted ceilings, the Goddess was always depicted as a wretch, all twisted limbs and clawed fingers, lips smeared with the blood of crusaders she’d devoured in battle. But in this portrait, the Dark Mother looked beautiful, even gentle. Her skin was a deep shade of ebony, almost as dark as Her veil, but Her eyes were moon pale and wide. She didn’t look like the damned Goddess of witches and hells. No, in this depiction, She appeared more mortal than monster . . . and somehow, that was worse.

The Year of the Witching, pg. 92