Blurb

Settled into her new life in Devon, England, Hannah Heronstone seems to have it all. A beautiful child, a loving husband and a fledgling business. She’s come to terms with who she is, a witch, a healer and cunning woman and has surrounded herself with her sister Midsummer Women. But dark clouds are gathering over Wentworth Manor.
Trouble arises the day she hires a new gardener, Raf. Handsome, manipulative and dangerous, his presence causes friction at work and in her personal life. By day, incessant rains threaten her herbal medicine business, flooding her fields. At night, strange visions plague her. Ælfwyn, a young Saxon Midsummer Woman, battles an ancient foe known only as Hrafen. The Raven.
When an ancient waterway springs to life, it leads Hannah to the shrine of the goddess Azenor, where she bargains for a cure for Peter, her husband, who despite her magic, she cannot seem to cure. To fulfill her part, Hannah must travel through time, risking her life to save not only her family but aid Ælfwyn, her old friend Mildritha, and the Wessex Kingdom of King Alfred the Great in their fight against the Raven.

Review

Now Comes the Raven, a historical fantasy by Jean M Roberts, opens with a beautifully described scene. Hannah Heronstone, woken by a thunderstorm, steps outside and watches—
Obscured by low-hanging clouds, a watery sun cleared the horizon, bathing the world in muted shades of gray. A chorus of buntings, finches and sparrows celebrated the dawn, signaling the start of the new day…
She catches sight of a young girl.
As Hannah watched, the landscape altered, her modern surroundings melting away, transformed into open fields, ripe with summer wheat, not a house or barn in sight. Gone was the manor house, her office and herb fields, all vestiges of modern life. The girl crouched beside a hedgerow of hawthorn, blackthorn and dog roses. Along the edge grew yellow primroses and red campion in full bloom.
The girl Hannah has caught sight of is dressed in the attire of a time more than a thousand years ago. She too can see Hannah and greets hers—
‘Wes hal, Hannah of the Heronstone. I am Ælfwyn.’
Then convulsed with terror she cries out, ‘Beware the Hrafn. He comes for us.’

Roberts’s prose brings to life a world that the reader can almost of smell and touch as well as see. This first scene gives a strong sense of what is to be found in the rest of the book—an intricately described world of natural beauty and of magic and a shiver of fear that grows as the story develops.

Now Comes the Raven continues the story of Hannah Heronstone found in The Midsummer Women. It begins some years after the end of the first novel. Hannah is now married to archaeology lecturer Peter Wentworth and together they have a delightful daughter of around four years old, with a wisdom beyond her years. They are living on Peter’s ancestral estate in Devon where Hannah has a thriving business growing herbs and supplying remedies to local shops. She is assisted by two sisters who are Midsummer Women too, part of the centuries old sisterhood of cunning women that Hannah discovered she belonged to in the first book. Hannah’s skills and knowledge as a cunning woman have deepened and grown in power over the intervening years.

All seems idyllic. But Peter’s health is gradually failing, and doctors cannot find a cause. Like all men in his paternal line have for centuries, Peter faces the prospect of a premature death. Hannah struggles to keep him alive with her spells, charms and sheer willpower. And Hannah needs more help with her growing business. She appoints a new gardener, Raf Blackson—on paper he seems ideal but, despite his physical charms and his apparent skills, she is uneasy and cannot bring herself to trust him.

The story is told in two timelines, the modern where Hannah struggles with the threat to her herb farm from increasing rain, other business problems, her growing worries about Raf and his possibly malign influence, and her concerns about her husband’s continuing ill-health. The ninth-century portions of the novel follow Ælfwyn, a young Midsummer woman herself, as she grows up learning herb lore and magic as an apprentice to Mildritha, Hannah’s friend and mentor from The Midsummer Women. Ælfwyn’s world, where Alfred the Great is the king, is being harried by marauding Danes marching beneath a banner bearing the image of a raven. The strands are skillfully woven together with Hannah initially watching Ælfwyn from afar through visions and dreams but eventually the only hope for resolution in both periods is for Hannah, using magic, to travel back to Ælfwyn’s time.

Roberts, as well as capturing the beauty of the countryside, brings the past to life through the minute details of daily life—work, food and dress and, most especially, through the use of magic and herbs, giving the reader a glimpse of the contemporary understanding of the world. However, Roberts is at her best in the way she slowly builds an atmosphere of threat beginning with unease and the occasional shiver to a pervading fear as Hannah faces the powerful darkness that is the Raven.

In all, Now Comes the Raven is a beautifully written dual-timeline novel—immersive, spine-tingling and page-turning—and is a perfect sequel to The Midsummer Women. While it can be read as a stand-alone novel, greater appreciation of the story and its characters will be gained if read after the first book in the series.