This first book in a series follows Elizabeth Hawksmith as she settles near the town of Matravers in England. She befriends a teenage girl and relays her stories throughout history. Because Elizabeth is a witch and immortal.

I really thought I would like this book. It has a lot of the elements I enjoy in a story. Magic. Historical Fiction. Even a little romance. But the book just wasn’t for me.

The writing was a bit convoluted. The sentence structure was mostly passive verb tense, which always somehow takes me out of the story. Also, there were long paragraphs of description that I found myself skimming a lot. There is a difference between using the scene as a separate character and just talking a lot about every corner of a room.

The historical fiction part of the book, set in the 1600s during the Black plague, the 1800s during Jack the Ripper, and the early 1900s around World War 1. I felt like they were just used because they were popular points in English history instead of a dive into the actual history, itself. There were some historical names used, but they aren’t more than just setting, themselves.

Overall, it’s just not a book for me, but if you like well-described scenes and brief historical fiction that is more for the fiction than the history, this might be a book for you. The idea of this book, the premise, is a good story, one that I’ve read in similar books like The Discovery of Witches and The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, but I prefer those books more.

---

Purchase The Witch’s Daughter by Paula Brackston at the affiliate links below!

---

If you liked this post, please subscribe and share with friends!