Thanks so much to the very talented Alabama writer, Mike Burrell, author of the newly published novel The Land of Grace, for this review. Here's what Mike had to say about The Witches of Moonlight Ridge:
The setting of Moonlight Ridge is a pervading
force in this charming novel. It’s a believable setting, filled with loving
parents and happy, adventurous children. But it’s also a mysterious land of
ruins, a magical forest, witches, sinister lawmen, KKK, monsters, all swirling
in history, legends, and myths that its characters can almost reach out and
touch.
The timeline of the story is also important in that the tale unfolds back in the 1950s in a Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn kind of world when parents didn’t hover over their children and think it necessary that every movement of their children be somehow supervised. An example is when the grandmother prepared a picnic lunch for the children and told them to go find the cat, knowing they would be wandering the woods all day. I’m not sure this could happen today, and I can almost hear readers wonder “where are the parents?”
The timeline of the story is also important in that the tale unfolds back in the 1950s in a Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn kind of world when parents didn’t hover over their children and think it necessary that every movement of their children be somehow supervised. An example is when the grandmother prepared a picnic lunch for the children and told them to go find the cat, knowing they would be wandering the woods all day. I’m not sure this could happen today, and I can almost hear readers wonder “where are the parents?”
The first-person narrator, Lily Claire, is a young girl. She’s convincing in her narrative and the wonder she finds in the world around her. She is drawn so deftly that at no time does the author intrude on Lily’s story. Her sidekick is her cousin, Willie T. All of the characters are sharply drawn, and the dialogue artfully rendered so as to project regionalism without implying ignorance. My favorite character, and the most complex member of the cast, is Erskine Batson, the garbage man/reluctant school teacher who falls in love with the beautiful witch, Evy.
A delightful and charming story for the young reader as well as certain seventy-two year old men who enjoy a little magic mixed with memories of a rural childhood.
About - Mike Burrell
