I would like to thank NetGalley, HarperCollins UK, One More Chapter and Katherine Livesey for providing me with an ARC of ‘Sisters of Shadow’ in exchange for an honest review.

Full of adventure, friendship, queer representation and magic, ‘Sisters of Shadow’ tells the story of two girls on a quest to find themselves and each other. When Alice is kidnapped by a coven of malicious witches, Lily throws herself headfirst into a quest to save her friend. Told from the dual perspective of Alice and Lily, Livesey masterfully takes the reader right into the emotional and mental states of the central characters, allowing the reader to experience the world through the eyes of Lily and Alice.

When both characters found love within the book, it was refreshing that their budding romances were not the source of their strength and courage in the face of adversity, but it was their sisterly-bond and love for each other that fuelled their individual quests.

Whilst I did enjoy the book, I did find it quite slow in places. Nevertheless, I found the character’s and the inter-character relations were well-developed and maintained throughout.

I would recommend this book to fans of middle grade/young adult fantasy fiction. I look forward to finding out what happens to Alice, Lily and their newfound family in the next book and what secrets Alice and Lily will unearth.

This book was a overall very good read. I enjoyed the plot and characters as well as the story that was being told.

Thank you Net Galley and the publishers for a free ARC.

While a quick read, I did not enjoy this book as much as I expected to, I had a hard time with the characters and plot development.

I am all for sapphic, cottage living witches in the forest. The beginning really held my attention as the friendship between Alice and Lily was woven for the reader to truly feel how connected the two girls were. Unfortunately the pacing of the book, was not ideal with how the plot developments were introduced. Overall, it wasn’t a bad book to read, but I probably wouldn’t choose to read it again.

Thankyou you to NetGalley and One More Chapter/Harper Collins UK for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

To all my fellow witches, this is a wonderfully whimsical and magical read!

Alice and Lily have this amazing friendship (reminds me a bit of Agatha and Sophie (opposites attract) but a lot more wholesome and beautiful). It has smart and strong female characters at its core. This gives of strong ‘Anne of Green Gables’ vibes but more fantastical and mystical.

It is filled with a whole lot of heart, journey of self-discovery, classic good vs evil trope but witches style, and definitely what others have been describing it as cottagecore fantasy (calmly sips tea while trying to reign in the ecstatic feels). A very sweet story that represents LGBTQI+

A great debut of a novel, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I am so excited that this series will be continuing. I am one keen bean!

Don’t expect hard criticism about the book, I will definitely be recommending this to some costumers I perfectly know they enjoy this type of books. But was a no for me, couldn’t get along very well with the story and the characters…. Well I didn’t get attach to them. But the writing was beautiful and easy to follow so i see the potential! I will probably read more form this author in the future. Is the first book so I know for sure the next will be great ❤️

I really enjoyed Sisters of Shadow and it was a quick read for me. I was hooked from the beginning and I loved the connection between Alice and Lily. There was a lovely world built in Sisters of Shadow and an interesting plot throughout. Will definitely be reading more from Katherine Livesey in the future

I really really really wanted to love this book. I thought it would be a quick read and a good break from more serious reading, however it read as so juvenile. Yes I understand it is teen fiction, but it read like a teenager's fantasy land gone wild in a whimsical world. I try very hard to find something positive about even book I read, I think with some serious edits and a more mature voice this book would be excellent. I hope being this is slated to be a serious there is some growth in the sequels.

I loved the witchy vibes and cottagecore aesthetic of this book, the setting and sapphic relationships were what drew me to Sisters of Shadow. The beginning hooked me in with the atmosphere that was created and I did really like the characters, the dual perspective was interesting and I enjoyed reading about both sisters. However, for me, the pacing was very slow in places and difficult to follow. That being said, I am looking forward to reading the sequel!

Thank you for the eArc.

I'm not sure how to review this one. I really liked the sound of it: forests, moors, lighthouse, a sinister group of possible witches.
The two main characters and alternating POVs are Lily & Alice - life-long friends from a small town on the edge of the forest. Alice lives alone, her parents having vanished some years previously, and is the topic of local gossip, with many believing her to be a witch. In fact, Alice desperately wishes she had magic like her mother and ends up accepting the invitation to join the witches (which comes via kidnap) where she meets Grace. Lily then decides her friend would never have left her behind and sets off for a lighthouse where she meets Jem, rather than the horde of evil witches she was expecting.

I'm not entirely sure of the target audience - the pacing and general style would suggest a younger than YA audience but bits of the violence and some of relationship developments raises the age to YA (not older YA but still, maybe not "middle grade")

But I think my main issue was that of time. Not just pacing - but with the passage of time within in the story. The journeys felt too quick for me - Lily's journey is over very quickly before she reaches the lighthouse. But how long was she at the lighthouse? Alice seems to have been at the witches hideout of some time but how long exactly? Also, why was the hideout so close to the lighthouse? and how did Jem know where it was (or did I miss it)?

I know this is supposed to be a trilogy and some things need to left mysterious but a little more world-building or revealing a little more backstory for at least some of the characters would, I think, have helped to make the story feel a little more solid. In the end, everyone seems to have mysterious pasts, there are several mysterious groups of people that aren't really explained.

I think younger YA or slightly older middle-grade readers will zoom through this and get swept away by the story - especially the forest at the beginning and the lighthouse.
I think I'm interested enough in the general story to try the next book but I hope very much it has more explanations (and shorter dialogue).

I'm very disappointed to say that I genuinely struggled to get through this book because I was so excited from the blurb and so drawn to the cottagecore witches story. However, it would have benefited from much more development in some areas. I didn't care much for the main characters. Their personalities and their relationships with one another were underdeveloped and somewhat underexplained─Alice's romance bothered me most of all, in all honesty. It genuinely didn't make any sense to me. Furthermore, the pacing of the book felt really strange to me. Sometimes, I was extremely bored because of how slow everything went and, sometimes, I felt like everything was being wrapped up way too quickly. In the end, that's what really made me struggle to get through this book. Because of this and the simplistic writing style, it felt like this book was meant more so for younger audiences than for the typical YA readers. However, there are some more adult themes, such as torture, because of which it's not entirely suitable for middle grade readers either. I hope that the author will find her public, but it won't include me.

This is a wonderful book that is just full of the elements that I adore in Middle Grade - whimsy, magic, cottagecore and fantasy.

It is the story of 2 sisters and one of them is kidnapped by witches early on. It is written from a dual POV, which I found really interesting, although difficult to follow at points. However, the worldbuilding was beautifully done and the settings were gorgeously written.

I would have liked it to be a bit more evenly paced but overall, a decent beginning for a debut author and I will certainly pick up the sequel.

Thank you for the eARC.

I received a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was excited to pick this one up. Cottagecore witchy vibes are right up my reading alley. Unfortunately, there were a few things that brought down my overall enjoyment of this book - the dialogue and the chapters/dual perspective.

I found the descriptions to be lovely and exactly the kind of flowery Anne of Green Gables stuff I enjoy. The dialogue however was distracting. The sentence structure and word choice didn’t feel like how real people talk and a lot of the time characters offered way too much information and insight into their inner monologues to be believable. It really took me out of the story and wrecked some otherwise great scenes.

The dual perspectives and length of chapters were an issue for me. Most of the chapters are very short and we end up bouncing between Lily and Alice’s POV’s so quickly I got whiplash. It was hard to really get into either character and where they were in their own arcs with how quickly the book switched between them. Longer chapters and maybe a few in a row from each to build the stories up would have helped.

As some other readers have noted there are some serious formatting issues with the kindle ARCs but I’m sure they will be fixed before publication. It did lead to some head scratching confusion on my part trying to parse garbled dialogue and description.

I know there is a sequel coming but I felt like there was too many hanging plot threads and not enough narrative exposition in this book. For the length of the novel I felt like I didn’t learn much about the world and the story. I would have liked more.
Overall this was a fun read , a little too light for me but I would continue to read the series.

When I finished reading Sisters of Shadow, I gave such a massive sigh of relief because finally, finally, it was over. I haven’t viscerally hated reading a book in a long time, which is why I couldn’t even bring myself to be nice about rating it. I couldn’t even say it was “okay” because it well and truly wasn’t.

I think, though, that this can mostly be attributed to me as a reader. Perhaps up to 90% of it can be. Thus, while I can’t say anything positive about this book (sorry, Katherine), I would stress that you realise it’s all me! It’s all personal! I really do hope this book finds its audience, so please don’t let yourself be put off it by this review.

That being said.

Quite frankly, this book is bland. There are two facets to this: the basic fantasy worldbuilding, and then the lack of specific worldbuilding.

Let’s take the basicness of it first. There’s nothing that feels at all creative about this world. It feels like every fantasy world did in the 2010s, so a good decade behind the best fantasy that’s out there at the moment. There’s nothing at all distinguishable about it—I can’t even remember half of it, because it was that bland. And because it was bland, it was also boring, thus setting the book itself up to be boring.

An inauspicious start, you might say.

And then, in the times it did attempt to get a bit more specific, all it left me with was more questions. Who are the witches? Why are they evil? How does it fit into whatever overarching worldbuilding that there is (or isn’t, as the case may be)? It all felt very superficial, as though it was thrown in at the last moment.

That superficiality carried over into everything else, I think. The characters didn’t have depth, so their relationships didn’t either. They met (and instantly trusted?) each other, they fell in love barely knowing the other person. It was almost as though the author thought this is what should happen, so it did, rather than thinking of how the characters might shape the story.

And don’t even get me started on the plot. It was as basic as the worldbuilding, and completely lacking in urgency. If you think your friend is in danger, why are you spending a month with a guy you don’t know, playing families? None of it made the slightest bit of sense.

To top it off, there was also the minor panic one of the main characters had over the prospect of wearing a pair of trousers? How to write gender roles into your bland fantasy I suppose…

All of which to say… I wish (or maybe I don’t) that I could write a more positive review. I just cannot. Like I said earlier, I haven’t a single good thing to say here. I can only hope I haven’t managed to fully put you all off it.

I struggled to get through this one. I felt like it was going through a bit of an identity crisis; the writing was very elementary, but the relationships, including friendships, were more YA.

There was a lot of telling the reader exactly how to feel about situations and characters-- just not good writing. The premise was interesting, but I do feel like there are a lot of similar plotted books that have just done it better.

Sisters of Shadow is a very obvious debut novel. Billed as a coming-of-age hero’s journey, we follow two friends. Alice has been stolen away by a mysterious group who promises to unlock her powers, and it’s up to her apothecary friend Lily to track her down and bring her back to the village.

This book was a challenge to read. While it had wonderful elements (magic, queer rep, skilled females), the whole book felt woefully underdeveloped. The pacing was off - many passages were full of description, but the action of scenes would swing through in a sentence or two. There is so much showing, it often felt like I was reading a first draft, rather than a finished novel.

In addition, you don’t need to suspend your belief throughout the novel - you have to throw it out the window. Many elements of the plot are not built in a believable manner, and with flimsy backstories for every character, their actions seem random rather than a logical sequence.

My hope is that the sequel will be better fleshed out.

Thank you so much netgalley and the publisher for providing an arc!
I am big time fantasy fanatic. . Also, the witchy vibes were pretty alluring to finish it asap.
I really like the worldbuilding, and how the author can create a world that has the capability of making us vicariously live through it. Also, amidst reading this, sometimes I feel like it was a bit too slow-paced for me. The characters are fairly interesting.
Also, hints of romances, betrayals and so much more jam packed into this book, made it pretty intriguing.

Henceforth, it was quite a good read.

This jumps right into the action and keeps the reader engaged as we follow two girls' journeys to discover themselves. Alice receives a mysterious letter and is kidnapped by a coven of witches and Lily sets out to rescue Alice shortly after. Each girl discovers secrets and hidden powers within themselves, as well as finding love. I really enjoyed this and I'm already excited for the sequel!

Alice has been alone most of her life, save her only friend Lily. She knows she comes from a long line of witches and believes she has magic deep within her. She jumps at the chance to train with other witches, but immediately discovers that the leader has sinister intentions. I liked seeing Alice make another friend and find love, she deserved to have someone by her side.

Lily has the more exciting storyline. She leaves home and travels across foreign lands, avoiding people who want to stop her and making some allies. She and Jem were a cute couple and seeing her with the children was pretty adorable. I can't wait for Lily to get some more answers about her family's past and see what else she's capable of!

This was a quick read and the pacing was well done. I still have some questions that I'm hoping we'll get answers to in the sequel. Great first book in a series!

I voluntarily read and reviewed this book. Thank you to HarperCollins UK and NetGalley for the copy.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an EARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.
Before I start, I just want to say, this book had so much promise and I was so excited for it. I love witchy books, a nature filled cottagecore setting sounds right up my street and a sapphic relationship had me intrigued from the beginning.
It did start out good, there was some good atmosphere and a hooking mystery aspect. Unfortunately that fizzled out rather quickly. I found the rest of the story to have pretty bland writing style that I had to force myself through. And although I appreciated the character relationships we got, that just simply wasn't enough for me to overlook the over simplistic and often predictable nature of this book.
I also felt as this book didn't quite know what age range it fitted into as at some points it felt like a weird hybrid of a middle grade and young adult novel.
I'm really quite sad about this one.

This was another book that I was excited for after reading the synopsis that unfortunately fell short of my expectations. If I was in more of a teen fantasy romance mood, I might have enjoyed it more. This book was a good read and I know some people will love it, but it just didn’t hook me in.

The pacing felt a little slow and I had to read some other books in the meantime because I couldn’t get into this one. This being said, I did enjoy the story once I found the time to concentrate on this book. Alice and Lily are best friends and have been for a long time. Alice lives on the outskirts of a town and Lily visits her almost every day, so when Alice is kidnapped, Lily sets out on a journey to find her. Sisters of Shadow is told from the dual perspective of both Alice and Lily.

‘You’re going to shine, Alice Blackwell. I can sense it. You’re going to shine and shimmer like a full moon on the waves of the stormiest sea.’

There is romance on the cards for both these characters as once Alice is at the lair of those that kidnapped her, Grace takes it upon herself to protect her and the romance that develops between them is very sweet. As for Lily, she stumbles across a boy and the children he has taken in and their romance is more of a slow burn, that I was 100% here for.

‘I promise you Alice, Blackwell, that I won’t ever leave you. They’ll have to kill me before I leave you.’

Overall, I enjoyed the magical elements of this story and the found family trope. I thought the characters were interesting, and I would still be interested in reading the sequel to see where the story heads and what is next for these characters.