Blurb

Since childhood, Ethnobotanist Hannah Heronstone has had a passion for healing plants and their use through the centuries. Orphaned at birth, she’s unaware of her connection to an ancient lineage of cunning women, healers, and yes, even witches. But they have not forgotten about her.

A surprise invitation to an archaeological dig lures Hannah to Maine and the site of a long forgotten English colony, abandoned in 1608. The presence of Dr. Peter Wentworth, rich, charming, and a recent fling, is an intriguing complication. But the thrill is cut short as the dig is plagued by accidents and attacks while bizarre visions disturb Hannah’s days and strange dreams fill her nights. Questioning her sanity, she turns to a trio of local women, who claim descent from a sisterhood of natural healers and practitioners of earthly magic, the Midsummer Women.

Together they help Hannah connect with the past, to Anna, a young cunning woman forced into servitude by the powerful Wentworth family. Against her will, she sails to the new world with her hated master. When Anna breaks her healer’s vows by using the black magic of a local demon, she taints the blood and lives of her Heryonstan descendants.

To save the man she loves and restore her bloodline to the sisterhood, Hannah must resist the growing power of the demon, Tando, and learn to harness the dormant magic of the Midsummer Women or be doomed to follow in her ancestor’s fate.

Review

The Midsummer Women by Jean M Roberts begins with Dr Hannah Heronstone, an ethnobotanist with an interest in medicinal herbs grown in cottage gardens, lost in a sudden fog. She finds herself in a small village with medieval thatched cottages, a Saxon chapel and gravestones bearing her family name. The village is called Heronstone. The mystery deepens when an ageless woman steps from behind a large grave monument. She says she is Mildritha, ‘the keeper of the dead’. She knows who Hannah is, knows her mother’s name. Their exchanges are a mixture of the mundane, as she directs Hannah back to the motorway, and the magical when she explains what the stone is that Hannah has picked up from one of the graves – a heron stone.
A stone that’s cold but burns the flesh. Smooth as silk, but tears the skin, easily forgotten but always present. When all seems lost, turn to the power of the heron stone.
The scene is atmospheric and chilling with an underlying sense of unease which intensifies as the novel progresses.

Out in the sunshine again, Hannah dismisses it all as weird and gets on with her life – delivering a paper at a conference and visiting the stately home of wealthy and handsome Dr Peter Wentworth with whom she has a brief fling. While at Wentworth Manor she has her first haunting glimpse of Anna, a young woman of the late sixteenth century, forced into service with the Wentworth family following the death of her mother, a cunning woman who had been accused of witchcraft.

Glimpses and vivid dreams of Anna’s life follow Hannah when she is unexpectedly invited to take part in an archeological dig in Maine of an English colony that was abandoned in 1608. Hannah struggles to understand what is happening as strange accidents plague the dig and some of her companions behave inexplicably, but she is drawn towards a small group of local women who can give her insight into what is happening.

The physical locations, both England and Maine, and the two time periods are presents in beautiful detail. Roberts’ descriptions of an archaeological dig, and the way participants can interact are fascinating. The novel’s underlying premise comes from the question of what if magic is real. The charms and herbal remedies described are genuine Anglo-Saxon charms that Roberts uncovered in her research for the book.

As we fall deeper into Hannah and Anna’s story, the sense of threat increases as menace from the past leaks into the present and, like Hannah, the reader does not know who among those around her can be trusted. The pace increases and by the end the novel is an absolute page turner.

The Midsummer Women is a spellbinding and absolutely gripping dual timeline historical fantasy with a touch of romance. Read my review of the sequel, Now Comes the Raven, here. It is every bit as compelling as The Midsummer Women.