The Witch in the Well sees Camilla Bruce making a welcome return to the winning formula of unreliable narrator + hints of horror/fantasy/folklore that made her debut, You Let Me In, so dazzling. The three voices are distinct, creating a tangible persona for each of our main players – and even where they seem to overlap, this only adds to the intrigue. Indeed, I wanted more of everything; the scenes involving Elena and Cathy as children, for example, are so atmospheric that I longed to spend more time in that particular milieu. Bruce is just incredibly good at weaving inexplicable, fantastical things into the stories her characters tell, while at the same time throwing in details that make you question/doubt everything you’ve just read. It’s a combination I find irresistible, and I enjoyed every weird, slippery word of The Witch in the Well. Both Elena and Cathy set out to write this "true" story of Ilsbeth, and have VERY different reasons and ideas about how to go about doing so. I've mentioned Cathy's, because she feels persecuted by the town in the same way that she believes Ilsbeth was, but Elena's is quite different.

When she saw Betty the thrush, the witch lay on the ground groaning. Betty sang and the girls heard her song over the sound of their spinning wheels. The door opened and she flew up the stairs. ‘I am Betty turned into a thrush,’ she sang to her friends. The little dog Pincher ran up and joined in Betty’s song. The girls all stared at the little thrush in amazement, then they heard Betty’s voice in amongst the thrush’s song. The girls all giggled and followed thrush Betty down the stairs. As they came out into the sunlight, they saw the witch flying off,This was interesting. We knew up front that one of them is dead, and the other accused of her murder. But their stories were wonderful. Although it was a little confusing in the beginning, a little more concentration on my part revealed the separate entities. Betty realized the old woman sitting by the well was no ordinary member of the game, she was a real witch and they were in real trouble. Overall though, it’s an interesting combination of local folklore with some mild horror and spooky supernatural with questionable narrators. It’s a good book but doesn’t hook me in the same way as In the Garden of Spite which remains my favourite Camilla Bruce book. There's a property, I guess a castle and a well on this property, where many years ago a local woman, Ilsbeth, who the townspeople believed was a witch, drowned.

Elena is shown to be a bit ditsy in the beginning, in her role as vlogger on the internet, with her New Wave ramblings about getting in touch with the SOUL VOICE (always in capitals) and constant selfies posted with hashtags. After her possession by Ilsbeth, her realization that Cathy is determined to prevent the publication of her novel comes too late for her to prevent the plunge into tragedy. Bruce expertly shows us the perspectives of both of her characters, with each section demonstrating their rivalry with the other whilst they inadvertently highlight their own personal flaws. The Witch In The Well recalls Christopher Priest’s superlative The Prestige (1995) in its compelling depiction of two destructively obsessive personalities that mirror each other’s flaws. As with Priest’s novel, as Bruce’s narration progresses, both Cathy and Elena tell the reader more about their own selves as they ostensibly talk about each other. The novel also has echoes of Arthur Machen’s terrifying short story ‘The White People’ (1904), in which a faux naïve voice is used to imply truly horrific events behind the scenes that the story’s narrator is oblivious to until it is too late. Similarly, much of the almost unbearable tension in The Witch In The Well comes from how both Cathy and Elena have absolutely no idea about the malevolent forces that they are inviting in, and when they do realise it it’s far too late to do anything about it. Bruce is in masterful control throughout, and the reader can only look on in horror as events draw to their inevitable conclusion. This book is about three women, and is told from three narrative perspectives. All of them are unreliable to certain degrees.

Broadcast

Culture Trip launched in 2011 with a simple yet passionate mission: to inspire people to go beyond their boundaries and experience what makes a place, its people and its culture special and meaningful — and this is still in our DNA today. We are proud that, for more than a decade, millions like you have trusted our award-winning recommendations by people who deeply understand what makes certain places and communities so special. The building upon which it is affixed (now containing the Tartan Weaving Mill) was built in 1851, for the Castlehill Reservoir. [4] [7] [5] The 1851 building replaced its 17th-century predecessor, constructed when act of parliament in 1624 enabled the bringing of fresh water into the city from the nearby Pentland Hills. [8] [9] In 1674 the reservoir was connected to 12 wells around the city, eventually closing in 1992, and converted into the Tartan Mill in 1996. [8] [9] Since you are here, we would like to share our vision for the future of travel - and the direction Culture Trip is moving in. Between the years 1500 and 1660, up to 80,000 suspected witches were put to death in Europe. Around 80 percent of them were women thought to be in cahoots with the Devil and filled with lust. Germany had the highest witchcraft execution rate, while Ireland had the lowest.

Thank you to Macmillan-Tor/Forge, Tor Books and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.It may not be a hug-it-and-love-it-book, but it’s viciously clever and that sort of thing goes along way with me. The confrontation between the two doesn’t go well. Elena is surprised and disbelieving that Cathy is writing a book on the same subject, while she is certain hers will be the definitive one since she has Ilsbeth’s spirit guiding her. There are a whole bunch of layers here, you might get away with calling it an Epistolary Novel because it is really just a bunch of documents put together. That can make for a rough structure, where you don't feel like the story is really unfurling, but that is not the case here. Instead it lets us see several stories through several points of view.