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“Hunt’s slim, dark novel reads like a fairy tale more twisted than Grimm…Hunt evokes countless stories embedded in the American consciousness—and then makes them even more terrifying…This is a perfect book to read when you’re safely tucked in your home, your back to the wall, while outside your door the wind rips the leaves from the trees and the woods grow dark.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“Hunt’s accomplished prose creates the atmosphere of possibility and danger that lurks in the best fairy tales, where anything can happen but everything has a cost. Highly recommended for fans of that amorphous border between fantasy, horror, and literary fiction.”
— Booklist (starred review)
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“The eerie, disturbing story of one of our perennial fascinations—witchcraft in colonial America—wrapped up in a lyrical novel of psychological suspense.”
— Bookbub
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“It tackles witchcraft in colonial America, providing a mythology that’s sure to disturb.”
— BookRiot
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“Johansson gives the many female characters their own vocal personas, helping listeners differentiate the women in the woods—Goody and the various strangers she encounters. This story is best enjoyed in audio form because of its meandering plot. Johansson encourages listeners to immerse themselves in the experience.”
— AudioFile
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“A wonderful, luminous, sly tale that orbits around a very grim core, growing darker and darker as it goes.”
— Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses
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A New York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice
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[Hunt] has fashioned an edge of-the-seat experience more akin to watching a horror movie. Don't go in the cellar! Don't eat that pig meat! Darkness is everywhere. . . . So prepare yourself. This is a perfect book to read when you're safely tucked in your home, your back to the wall, while outside your door the wind rips the leaves from the trees and the woods grow dark.
— New York Times Book Review
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Engrossing... a game abundant in mysteries but scant in resolutions. The book's greatest strength is its striking, sensual prose.
— The New Yorker
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'"A dark treat of a novel: lush, exciting and gorgeously strange.
— Sarah Waters
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I adored this book and found it to be entirely spellbinding and scary and strange... It carries us along in a current of intoxicating dread, bearing witness to one woman's dreamlike journey of the soul.
— Mona Awad, author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
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A thrilling, magical tale that straddles two worlds: the harsh, at times grim reality of colonial New England, and the imaginative shadow world from which the oldest fairy tales are woven.
— Kathleen Kent, bestselling author of The Heretic's Daughter
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With the surprise of fairy tale and fable but with the complexity of one's favorite literary novel, Laird Hunt again gives us fierce, complex women living in American history.
— TaraShea Nesbit, author of The Wives of Los Alamos
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Hunt's accomplished prose creates the atmosphere of possibility and danger that lurks in the best fairy tales, where anything can happen but everything has a cost. Highly recommended for fans of that amorphous border between fantasy, horror, and literary fiction as found in the work of Kelly Link, in Joy Williams' The Changeling (1978), or in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979).
— Booklist, Starred Review
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The eerie, disturbing story of one of our perennial fascinations--witchcraft in colonial America--wrapped up in a lyrical novel of psychological suspense.
— BookBub
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It's tough to give a simple description of this book, except to say that it tackles witchcraft in colonial America, providing a mythology that's sure to disturb.
— Bookriot