Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Dark and mysterious this novel is beautifully written although a little unorthodox. A little lacking in action. Nevertheless a good book all round. Recommended.

Wasn't able to read and review book before it was removed form my e-reader


Cala blends the occult with the modern, following a small community of women living on the outskirts of their Hebridean society, where they have always followed the rigid rules set down by one of their ancestors, a suspected witch.

Cala, a stone farmhouse on the edge of a village in the Outer Hebrides, is home to four women – witches the locals say – who scratch out a living on its land. But after ten years of relative harmony, fractures are beginning to appear among them. Sick of scavenged seaweed and thin soup, eighteen-year-old Euna decides to go in search of a different way of living.

This book has an unusual narrative style, which made it hard for me to gauge the setting. Once I realised that this was contemporary fiction and not historical or even dystopian, I struggled with some plot elements- is there no such thing as child protective services in the highlands? What about pre- and post-natal care? I found it strange that the author decided to write a book which deals with migration, forced labour and deportation, and feature a protagonist who knows next to nothing about the events taking place out in the 'real world'. Cala felt like two books to me- the first one is the story of a girl attempting to break away from her strange, controlling family, while the second is a romance between a local girl and a migrant worker. I usually enjoy books about small communes and persuasive cults, but the Cala witches were so secretive I learned next to nothing about them. The people the protagonist meets on her adventures view her nativity as a quirk instead of realising (or perhaps admitting) that she has been abused. Would I, as an adult, feed her alcohol and drugs or try and sleep with her? Absolutely not...which made it hard for me to empathise with the cast of characters who do. This book reminded me of Gather The Children, another book in which girls are brought up in near-total isolation yet forced to take on very adult roles and responsibilities. This book did not contain enough magic, or enough realism, for me.

This book is short read that reads like a fairy tale, a very dark scary fairy tale.
The story and characters are interesting enough, mainly when it came to all the Gaelic culture that was entwined with the story but what I really liked the most was unique way Laura Legge has of telling a story. The way she played with the structure of the story, dialogues and punctuation make me really curious to read whatever she is writing next.
Thank you to NetGalley and Apollo for this ARC.

The book's theme - a coven of witches struggle to get by on a farm in the Outer Hebrides -sounded intriguing. It turned out to be a beautifully told coming-of-age story about the coven's youngest member, Euna, who rebels against the coven's strict rules by sleeping with a local fisherman - a course that ends in her flight and her attempt to survive in the modern world. I loved the way that the coven was governed and restricted by a book, the ‘Life Grammar’ compiled by an ancestor of the current leader.

I also loved the series of transgressions and changes Euan has to go through, the lyrical telling of the story, the uncanny sense of other worlds ... and an enjoyable absurdity, I was slightly less interested in the second half of the book told mainly through the fisherman, Aram,

Overall, despite many superb elements to the story, I found it hard to connect to any one person in this complex tale, especially in the second half. These things can be very subjective and I will definitely look out for Laura Legge's next book - this is a wonderful new writer.

This was a promising debut. I liked the idea of the "coven" of forur women tyring to live independent lives in the haven of Cala , set apart from the local community.

The turning g point plotwise is when one of the four women, Euna, having started to have mixed feelings about the coven, meets Aram . Aram has been working on the salmon farm. Aram proves to be a catalyst for change in the whole community as he also meets the ministers's daughter Aileen too.

The evocation of the Gaelic way of life on the remote Scottish island is well done. The author uses lots of Gaelic in the text which gives it authenticity.

The dynamics between the members of the coven is intriguing.

Some readers who have reviews this book found the Aram part of the book less interesting but this section does provide a balance.

The aspects of the book I struggled with were aspects of the plot. For example I thought that the initial encounters between Euna and Aram were short lived but later in the book it talks about Aram missing her singing.

Why call one character Good Muireall and another Bad Muireall ? Was the author trying to emphasise the different "maternal" approaches of both women?

Plotwise its necessary, but both Aram and Euna seem to be very lucky in finding people who will take them in so quickly.

Some cultural references also puzzled me. Aram picks up sachets of syrup. I am unsure whether the author means syrup because I have never come across syrup packets whilst living in Scotland.

Aram's "conversion" at Dungavel doesn't seem psychologically convincing to me.

In summary there were glimpses of what could have been a great book but I found this book unsatisfactory in some aspects.

The setting & blurb about this book looked very promising. Set on an island in the Outer Hebrides, four women live of what they can scrape from the land. Led by a very unpleasant woman who dictates how the women behave, who they speak to & how they dress. When Euna, one of the younger women meets Arum, a fish farm worker, she is initially looking for food but is fascinated by him. After the Home Office catches up to him & detains him as an illegal immigrant Euna goes in search of him.

The style of this book is quite unique. The lack of speech punctuation was confusing & I often struggled to follow what was going on. I didn't enjoy this as much as I hoped, but I did stick with it because I wanted to find out what happened. This is a book for someone looking for something that bit different. I'll be interested to see where the author goes from here.

You know those books wherein everything works perfectly within the context of the book but nothing really touches you? Have you ever had that feeling? I am sure you have had it at some point and with this book, I got the same feeling.

The novel starts with the island called Pullhair in Outer Hebrides and it is very, very atmospheric and when you read it, it’s almost as if you are there feeling every weird thing that Euna is feeling and that is one of the major plus points of the book, if I am being honest. Of course, even that didn’t quite work out the way I had hoped for.

Euna hasn’t always lived at Cala, she used to live in the outer world but the outer world didn’t understand her or want her and so she came to Cala. From the time she was seven, Cala is all Euna has known, with its residents loving and hurting at once and its history of it being a witch’s house. Euna has had questions over the years as she grew up but at eighteen, her questions are bursting out of her at any given moment and disturbing the entire household. The fact that this is set in contemporary world should have only enhanced this almost magical way of living but sadly, it really didn’t.

Perhaps I was mistaken into thinking that this story would be very atmospheric from its blurb and in a certain way, it was atmospheric but not in the way presented in the blurb. There’s the question of Euna being the main character. Even though she seems to be, there are other characters given more importance, then to top it off, in between with their personalities changing, it made for a confusing read for me. I fear to even talk about Aileen, I might not end up being favourable at all so, you can read the book to experience that. I wish Aram’s story wasn’t done in the way it was, sure it helped the plot along but that didn’t mean that it was the best course of action.

I did enjoy the fact that one of the major themes of the book was female relationships and how they were presented in a realistic way. These four women did love each other in their own way but there was no shortage of hate or dislike as well, they did spend an awful lot of time together and it showed in their almost there but not quite hate. I think overall, this book is beautifully written but none of that grabbed me or touched me in a way that made me invested in the characters and their journeys.

I am so sorry this review is all over the place (basically a mess) but even after almost a week of finishing it, I am not able to place my thoughts in a good way. I gave this one three stars and they are totally deserved, I just wish I was able to be more invested in the book.

I know Cala might not be to everybody’s taste- there are some questionable morals and even more questionable main characters in this book- but nevertheless I really enjoyed it. Set on an island in the remote Scottish Hebrides, Cala follows Euna, a young woman who defies the coven with whom she lives and sets out to find her own destiny. Legge’s prose is dreamy and vague, and reading this book feels rather like seeing the world off-kilter: it’s refreshing, and strange, and watching the relationship dynamics of the characters shift as the book goes on is absolutely fascinating.

My thanks to Head of Zeus for an e-ARC via NetGalley of Laura Legge’s debut novel, ‘Cala’ in exchange for an honest review.

The women of Cala are introduced in this striking early scene: “The four women of Cala sat in its dining room on the autumn equinox, wearing garlands of ash and hazel, visible to one another only by candlelight.”

‘Cala’ is set in the Outer Hebrides. In the small village of Pullhair, the stone farmhouse that the four women call Cala, haven, is known by the villagers as Gainntir, place of confinement. Legge makes it clear that the novel takes place in the 21st Century yet all modern implements, including electricity, are banned at Cala. The women identify as a coven.

The leader of the coven is Muireall, who is controlling and manipulative. Their lives are governed by the ‘Life Grammar’, a book compiled by Cairstìne Bruce, an ancestor of Muireall and an alleged witch. It contains two hundred rules for a coven that Cairstìne had always wanted to run.

One of the younger women, Euna, feels increasingly unsettled. While running an errand to a local fish farm she meets Aram and is strongly attracted to him and vice versa. However, Aram is an illegal immigrant. When he is detained in Dungavel Castle, an immigrant detention facility, Euna stealthy leaves Cala in order to visit him.

‘Cala’ is written in a very lyrical style and Legge utilises some unconventional techniques such as not using quotation marks to designate dialogue and mixing English, Scottish Gaelic and some dialect. It took a while to get used to this.

I was quite interested in Euna’s journey of self discovery but was less taken by Part 2 when the narrative focus shifts to Aram. Also, I had hoped for more exploration of the mystical elements of the setting.

So overall I found that my response to the novel was mixed. I admired elements and felt connected to some characters but the whole felt somewhat disappointing.

Cala has an intriguing premise, and I was initially willing to see where the author would take things. Mostly atmosphere and not much action, I read the first third and decided to leave it there, as the book was not holding my attention and the writing style wasn't to my taste. I could see some readers falling hard for this book but unfortunately this one wasn't for me.

I was really intrigued by the synopsis and enjoyed the first part of the book but I found the second part dragged and the plot lines where a bit thin. The characters weren’t very likeable which didn’t help.

There's a lot of adjective I could use to describe this book: fascinating, enthralling, atmospheric, engaging and even entertaining.
It was a really good book, one of the those book you cannot put down once you start it.
I love the well written and fleshed out characters and I loved the atmospheric setting.
The plot was fascinating and it kept me hooked till the end.
I had some minor problems with the style of writing as it made somehow difficult to understand when a character was speaking and there were some slow paced part.
A very good debut, I will surely read other books by this author.
Many thanks to Head of Zeus and Netgalley for this ARC. I voluntarily read and reviewed this book, all opinions are mine.

A really original storyline. Thoroughly enjoyed this book. A very different read from my usual genre of thriller. However this book had plenty of mystery and suspense. At times deeply gripping. A very enjoyable book x

An unusual little story about a small group (coven) of women living in seclusion on an island in the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland. The writing style and language take some getting used to but the story is intriguing and worth a little perseverance.

Cala is a novel which intrigued with its description but fell somewhat short of the mark for me.
Fantasy, magic, female led and blending modern day with age old mysticism - these elements are what this novel is interweaving. All topics that are quite popular now and potentially make for a wonderful story. Legge has identified a type of novel that could do so well with modern readers. However, the novel doesn't quite live up to the sum of its parts.
I did like Euna as a character in general, and her voyage of discovering herself and the wider world from very unusual circumstances was interesting, but all of the characters together were a bit chaotic. Chaotic also were certain scenes in the novel, where things were happening but I had to read and reread in order to fully make sense of what was unfolding. Set in modern day, I couldn't help but feel that it would have made little difference to the story if it were set fifty years ago, and this may have actually added something more to it if it were. I did enjoy the Garlic elements of it as they add a level of authenticity to the character dialogue.
Worth reading for its uniqueness.

Firstly, as this is I believe Laura Legge's debut novel, praise should be given to her for producing something that is a bit different and for a willingness to experiment in her prose, characterisation and plot lines. All to often now there is an inherent sameness that proliferates much of new fictional work so it was a refreshing change to come across something that had elements of originality and daring about it. There is for instance the intermingling of Gaelic, English and the Scottish dialect and the absence of speech marks. It may not altogether succeed and there are in my opinion some issues regarding the veracity of the plot at times but the exuberance of the writing makes up for this. Legge has created a world that straddles between the familiar and the unfamiliar where mythology, ritual and the occult are indelibly bound up with the natural world.

The main location for the novel is a small island called Pullhair situated in the outer Hebrides where living in a stone farmhouse called Cala in isolation and outside of the small island community are four women. The locals call them witches and indeed their subsistence scavenged life style is dominated by obscure rituals . This "coven" is ruled over by the controlling, manipulative and often cruel figure of Muireall who is clearly unbalanced. Living with her are ex-lover Grace and two eighteen year old cousins Euna and Lili who have been there some ten years after being abandoned by their families and ostracised by the local community following a church arson attack. How the local authorities would allow two eight year old's to be left in the care of the clearly deranged Muireall is one of the many troubling and bizarre occurrences that we encounter.

After the increasingly unsettled Euna meets and falls for Aram who is from the local fish farm and it transpires is an illegal immigrant who is subsequently taken to the real life Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre in South Lanarkshire , the scene is set for Euna to leave Cala and seek out a new life with or without Aram.

Ultimately you have the impression of viewing an alternative world and I can see that it may appeal to those who like the fantasy genre. At times gripping, at times baffling and absurd I was never bored and would certainly recommend this to someone who would like to experience something out of the norm.

For me this was quite an obscure book, in which I could appreciate some decent and well-constructed prose style, and the somewhat plausible development of characters. Compared to the descriptions and blurb that I read prior to delving into the novel, the book was not what I expected. Legge builds an interesting alternate world around the female characters and offers readers some pondering concepts about how we live, sexism and how culture or society may dictate the way we behave. Longings for escape juxtapose well with the continued references to the learned behaviours and rituals the women face day in and day out, thus being the main source of engagement for readers. Perhaps as a lesser fan of the fantasy genre which this seems to lend heavily from, I am somewhat easily dissuaded from the overall success and appeal of this book. it just wasn't what I expected.

A read, really, for those who appreciate the imagined worlds and oddities of fantasy fiction; think along the lines of Pratchett or Gaiman, with perhaps what we could call a more serious undertone. Overall a well written book, which has purpose and conviction in the world and characters it presents. It just was not what was anticipated.

#Cala #netgalley

Take the idiosyncratic female-centric community at the heart of The First Book of Calamity Leek; add the bleak and isolated setting of Little Eve and the shifting, muddy nature of Everything Under; and you’d end up with something like Cala. This is a strange, slippery novel, a cacophony of creative language that only occasionally comes into focus.

Cala is a farmhouse on the Hebridean island of Pullhair. It’s home to a tiny commune consisting of ex-lovers Muireall and Grace and teenage cousins Euna and Lili. The relationships between the four women are tangled and odd, their rituals obscure and apparently random. (Others believe them to be a coven of witches.) The text seems to skip over much of what, in another book, would be the pertinent details. Yet jewel-like sentences kept catching my eye: Under the world’s grey roof, she was the only bright furniture.

The plot follows Euna as she grows dissatisfied with the coven and travels to the mainland in search of a new life. As I read on, it became obvious that the strange relationships were not confined to Cala itself, but are in fact a hallmark of the book. Everyone behaves so bizarrely and implausibly, and often in ways that are borderline disturbing, towards everyone else. I often felt like I was reading a fantasy novel set on some far-flung planet, not a story situated in modern Scotland.

Ultimately I couldn’t get to grips with the characters’ weird interactions. I do think this book has the potential to be really popular, though. It possesses a poetic and emotive style that’s in vogue at the moment, a way of evoking myth and magic within a nominally contemporary narrative.