I think this might be an unpopular opinion but I’m not sure what to make of this book. There are elements which I absolutely loved but then they’re are aspects of the plot that I found so totally implausible that I couldn’t fully immerse myself in the story, and I don’t mean the paranormal goings on.

On the plus side, this is an incredibly atmospheric and tense read. I loved the supernatural side to the story, which was creepy and thrilling in places. I really enjoyed the sense of an isolated community consumed by superstition and folklore. The gothic setting is vividly imagined and described in chilling detail.
The narrative structure is also gripping, as the story unravels itself through four perspectives and three timelines.

The history of Scottish witch trials is also clearly very well researched. The afterword makes a strong case for why the stories of these (mostly) women should not be forgotten and the injustices of the past should be recognised.

I love a creepy tale and I’m totally willing to suspend my disbelief for any amount of supernatural happenings but what I found difficult to believe here was the way authorities dealt with missing persons cases. In a missing child case it seems very unlikely that basic checks, such as name and date of birth, would not take place. This spoiled the whole spooky facade for me.

However, I was intrigued to find out the mystery of the island and it’s many disappearances and, overall, I would say this is a decent read if you’re after a supernatural thriller.

I had heard very good things about this book and couldn't wait to read it. I read this over two days as I couldn't put it down and I cried buckets at the end! This is a phenomenal book and one that will stay with me forever. All of the characters were brilliantly developed, the plot was gripping and thought-provoking and the setting was incredible. This is a book that I will be shouting out from the rooftops about and I can't wait to read more of the author's books.

The Lighthouse Witches is an intriguing novel, with a lot of twists and turns, and C. J. Cooke does an admirable job of managing the different narrative voices and timelines she's chosen.

There is a sense of eerie oppression and threat in the book, with echoes of the Wicker Man in the paranoid islanders, and the multiple viewpoints keep you on your toes, knowing some secrets and having to parse others out alongside the other characters. I was sure I would be giving this novel 5 stars - right up until the last 10 to 15 percent.

Unfortunately, a lot of good will I had for The Lighthouse Witches was lost during this last section. While I did get some of the answers I wanted, there were also a lot of answers to questions I think could have remained mysteries, while some of my burning questions remain unanswered.

There were also a few major issues I had with how things ended. Firstly, C. J. Cooke seems to have lost confidence with leaving the book as a supernatural/fantasy, and instead offers up various questionable sci-fi-esque theories through one of her characters, who has apparently become an expert researcher by the end of the book - all taking place off page and delivered via exposition.

Additionally, one of the main factors in convincing the reader that something malevolent is happening turns out to be the equivalent of a health condition macguffin,

Additionally, while the rest of the novel has provided atmospheric setting and pacing, far too much of the ending seems given over to exposition.

While I still enjoyed the novel in general, the rushed ending really stripped some of the enjoyment out of the Lighthouse Witches for me.

I read this absolutely beautiful book up until the point that pregnancy, infertility and miscarriage were a main part of the subject, at which point for personal reasons I stopped reading.

What I did read of the book was absolutely beautifully written and highly engaging, and I wish the author all the very best.

The Lighthouse Witches was a surprisingly inspired read for this time of year. Dark and more than a little creepy, I feared it would take the path heading to frightful horror but, actually, took the story in a direction that worked well for the characters, and readers, alike.

Liv, the mother of three girls, takes a commission to paint a mural inside an old Scottish lighthouse. Once the family are installed, strange things occur that spark the locals into talk of witches, curses and wildlings. As I progressed with the story I became concerned this story wasn't going to be my cup of tea but then I clicked with it and became concerned for the outcome of Liv and her girls. The end made me feel surprisingly emotional. A welcome surprise and a story well told.

A fantastic and eerie read. Such a great sense of atmosphere and plenty of twists and turn I didn't expect.
I enjoyed the multiple time lines more than I thought I would, they were expertly interwoven as the reader found out more and more of what was happening.

Each time line had it's own mystery as well which definitely kept you on your toes, along with the fact that you didn't know if the characters were reliable narrators.

I find the history of witchcraft and the women who were killed in the name of it absolutely fascinating as well as deeply saddening. I think the author wrote about this topic extremely well and I'd love to continue to look more into it.
The mentions of familiar folklore aspects sprinkled throughout were really enjoyable too.
I can just picture reading this book on an a misty rainy island, cosy by the fire with a storm raging.

I loved the setting in this one. The atmosphere was dark, creepy, and chilling. It also added to overall vibe of the story and helped move the plot along.

One thing I struggled with (and it might be just me), but I kept getting confused with all the characters. I kept getting mixed up and it was a little frustrating.

I thought the plot was great — unique and exciting. We’re thrown right into the story from the start, so I became very intrigued early on.

Overall, although I got a little confused by the characters, I really enjoyed this one. Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and author, for a chance to read and review this book.

On the island of Lon Haven off the Scottish coast stands an old, decommissioned lighthouse. This was in its turn built on the remains of an ancient broch underneath which lay a cave where, during the 1600s, women accused of witchcraft were imprisoned awaiting trial and execution. It's a place the locals fear, and keep well clear of, but now (1998) it's been bought, and the new owner has employed an artist to help turn the forbidding tower into a writer's studio.
Liv Stay doesn't believe in witches or ghosts, but there's certainly something spooky about the lighthouse she's been commissioned to paint. She's barely settled into the adjacent cottage before strange things start to occur, and within months her and two of her daughters have disappeared, like so many islanders before them. The surviving daughter, Luna, has spent her life moving between foster homes, keeping well away from Lon Haven, trying to forget what happened there, but over 20 years later she's drawn back to the island when one of her sisters is found at last - but not having aged at all.

I'm always on the look out for good supernatural stories, and I thought from what I'd heard online that this would be one, but overall I feel it disappointed.

It starts excellently. The author builds up the atmosphere of strange goings-on, of sightings of a small unknown child, of possible tell-tale signs of witchcraft activity gradually and carefully - enough to keep the reader intrigued; not so much that it seems completely over the top. The island's inhabitants tell of dreadful things happening in the past - the disappearance of children and their replacement by changelings - and hint that it still happens. It's enthralling; very dark and gothic, mixing terror and superstition.

But then - half, maybe three-quarters, of the way though I realised what the plot twist was, and from then I just wanted the characters to hurry up, see what was obvious to me, and solve the mystery. A bit like guessing the murderer in a whodunnit, it took the edge of the latter part of the book.

The Lighthouse Witches is a thriller that tells the story of a family's new life on a tiny Scottish island and the aftermath of the disappearances of the Mum and two of the three daughters. It's set across multiple POVs and two different time periods. One in 1998 detailing the family's new start and the events running up to the incident, and one set in 2021 following the middle daughter Luna (the only one who escaped) who gets a call from a hospital telling her that they've found her youngest sister Clover...except Clover is the exact same age she was when she went missing and that was over 23 years ago.

I thought this was a fun spin on the wildling/changeling child myth though I found certain sections in the middle confusing and hard to follow at times. I can't say much more about the plot because of spoilers.
I will say, although I usually like shorter chapters these were a bit pointlessly short and never really added anything.

My main issue with it was that I didn't really like or relate to any of the characters, some of them were downright annoying and so even in the book's tensest moments it never really gripped me. I didn't find myself reaching for it nor was I unable to put it down. Maybe I've just read too many thrillers that I'm a bit numb to them now?

But where it really excels is the atmosphere. You guys know I love lighthouses and atmospheric books set on or by the sea and this definitely fits the bill. C J Cooke writes the rugged moody landscape of Scotland so well and from a Scot who's grown up on the coast that's some high praise. I loved the way things like the ocean and the lighthouse were almost personified into their own characters. She also nails that small-town claustrophobia and the isolation that comes with living on an island.

Fantasy: 2.5/5
Gothic: 4/5
Mystery: 3/5

Overall: 3.16/5

Blurb: What should you do if you move to a strange island with mysterious happenings and the locals warn you? Absolutely not what characters in the novel did. Meet Olivia the Painter-Mom and her three daughters, Teen-angsty Sapphire, Looney Luna and baby brain Clover. Together they will do every possible thing that a sane person should not do. But then again its a horror novel, and those characters aren't usually the brightest. When our MC team visits Lon Haven, a Scottish island, all hell will break loose, literally. This novel has witches, grimoires, curses, ancient lighthouses, time skips, deus ex-machinas, ruins and runes both, and every perfect ingredient for a great Gothic novel, but one thing it doesn't have is consistency and coherency.

Strength: Wish I could tell you. As far as the Gothic elements are concerned, this novel ticks all the checkboxes. The plot is good, characters are investing, and ending satisfying.

Weakness: Plot-holes the size of actual potholes in India. Characters take stupid decision and you just want to reach in the novel and slap them on the face. I mean WHYYY will you go there when EVERYONE told you not to. SMH!!! But i guess plot got to advance. Don't expect a Wow read.

WTF moment: When they go to hospital and put on masks. Damn I know but reading it IN the novel when I am actually trying to escape the outside world just hit me right in the face. Kudos to the author for giving us that reality check.

The Lighthouse Witches by C.J. Cooke is a dark and chilling gothic thriller that drew me in from the very first page. The perfect book to read as we approach Halloween, it tells the story of Liv Stay and her three daughters. Moving seamlessly between three timelines, it’s a haunting and atmospheric tale that builds the tension slowly.

Beginning in 1998 we see Liv and her three daughters, Saffy, Luna and Clover, arrive on the remote Scottish island of Lòn Haven in search of a new home. Liv has been hired to paint a mural on the walls of an ancient lighthouse, but little does she know that her life is about to change forever. Fast forward to 2021 and it soon becomes apparent that a few months after arriving on the island Luna was the only one left. Her mother and two sisters disappeared without a trace and Luna has no idea what happened to them. But then something happens that draws Luna back to the island in search of the truth. What really happened to her family all those years ago?

Intertwined with the dual timelines of 1998 and 2021 an even stranger tale emerges. A terrible story of an ancient witch hunt that ended with a curse is slowly revealed. What, if anything, does this have to do with the mysterious disappearances that are plaguing the island centuries later? And is Luna finally about to uncover the truth of what happened at the lighthouse back in 1998?

The Lighthouse Witches is a fantastical story of ancient rituals and local folklore that kept me riveted throughout. C.J Cooke has written a spine tingling and atmospheric gothic thriller that keeps the surprises coming from beginning to end. A dark and unsettling tale, it isn’t a book you’d want to read on your own late at night, the eeriness and sense of intrigue and suspense ratcheting up to almost breaking point as the story moves towards its final, shocking denouement.

I don’t want to risk spoiling anything so all I will say is that The Lighthouse Witches is everything a dark and chilling gothic thriller should be. And I loved it!

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys fantastical stories that are deeply entrenched in history and folklore. C.J Cooke’s writing is superb and I can’t wait to read whatever she comes up with next!

Highly recommended.

This is the perfect book to be reading for this time of year! It's atmospherical, set in Scotland, there's a cursed town and has witches!

This book is split into two timelines, 1998 Liv moves her three children with her to Lon Haven for a commission job painting a mural in a Lighthouse. In the cave in the basement of the Lighthouse in the 1600s, 12 women were killed for being suspected as witches. It's believed that the witches cursed the town as revenge on the townspeople. Even in 1998, they believe that creatures called Wildings have been sent to destroy entire family bloodlines! Every so often, children go missing and then mysteriously return without any memory of what happened... Could they have been replaced by the wildings?

The other timeline is set in 2021, Luna lives in Coventry and is just getting by after the events of her traumatic childhood, in that her mother (Liv) abandoned her in the woods. She never saw her family again. Now an adult and about to start a family of her own, she wonders if she can ever move on from her past. One day she gets a call to say that her little sister Clover has been found! However, she was expecting to find a 29 yr old woman, not a 7yr old...

This book is creepy, dark and just incredible. I was gripped from the very first page and couldn't put it down! There's a beautiful folklore and Nordic mythology feel to this story and so cleverly written to bring into the modern era. I love how the author decided to incorporate real life historical events with the witch trials and attempting to include the names of the women who were killed, while also trying to give them a voice.

I think I read this in almost a day, and I couldn't recommend this enough!

A creepy thriller set in a fictional part of Scotland.
A mother and her three daughters travel to a remote island in Scotland where the mother has been commissioned to paint a mural in an abandoned lighthouse. Here, the family encounter sinister and dark happenings, is it witchcraft, magic or something else?

A story told in different perspectives, and in different time lines, it ties together to create an intense thriller which I couldn’t stop reading.

I always have mixed expectations when a book featuring witches appears on the shelves, because — as an experienced Witch myself — I want to see how the witchcraft is handled, aware of both the bloody history of so-called witches as well as the more contemporary definition of the same. And so it was when I started reading The Lighthouse Witches by C. J. Cooke.

In this novel, artist Liv flees to a remote Scottish island after receiving shocking news, taking along her daughters Saffy, Luna, and Clover. Liv is to paint a mural inside a lighthouse, which stands on the site of a prison where — in the 1660s — people were held before standing trial and being executed for being “witches”. The storyline flashes both forwards and backwards in time, with multiple narrators. Add in missing children, the discovery of an “ancient grimoire” from the witch hunts some three-hundred-plus years ago (and in surprisingly great condition), and the isolation of the island, and we have the makings of a truly gothic tale.

Sadly, I didn’t connect with this novel at all, despite it sounding like it would be right up my street. I found the characters to be insubstantial, certain plot elements and events to be explained away too easily, and the parts of the research into historical witchcraft in Scotland to be flimsy (for instance, most were strangled before being burned, not burned alive), though I appreciated the mention of the Witches of Scotland project in the Acknowledgements. Overall, I found it bland and boring, dreadfully slow, and very disappointing.

I received an e-ARC from the publisher, HarperCollins UK, through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Slow pace in the start but then it got faster after a few chapters. Great story of witches isolated in Scotland with secrets from years ago.

Liv moves to a small Scottish island to paint a mural in a lighthouse. She flees her old life in the middle of the night with her 3 daughters, Saffy, Luna and Clover.
Unfortunately this is not the happy move she was looking for.
I really enjoyed this book, there were dual timelines and multi narrators which I love! We flit backwards and forwards gradually learning just what happened to the girls and their mum.
A good, atmospheric, creepy story, I wanted to know what happened to Liv and her girls and hoped there would be a happy ending.

When struggling single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in The Longing, a 100-year-old lighthouse on the remote Scottish island of Lòn Haven, she sees it as an opportunity for a fresh start for her and her three daughters – fifteen-year-old Sapphire, nine-year-old Luna, and seven-year-old Clover. But all is not as it seems on Lòn Haven. Local legend says The Longing is built above a cave used to imprison and torture local women accused of witchcraft, and there are tales of Wildlings – supernatural creatures mimicking human children – wandering the local woodland.

Twenty-two years later, Luna is the only member of the Stay family still left. Now pregnant with her own child, she is left haunted by her time on Lòn Haven. All Luna knows is that she was found, apparently abandoned, in the woods near The Longing. Her sisters and mother have been missing ever since. So when Luna gets a call to say that Clover has been found, she is overjoyed at the thought of reuniting with her sister and discovering what happened on Lòn Haven all those years ago. Indeed, Clover is exactly the sister Luna remembers: she is, in fact, still the seven-year-old girl who vanished into the night all those years ago. How can Clover have been missing for so long yet not aged a day? Could there be more to the tales of Wildlings and witches’ curses than Luna believes? One thing is certain: Luna will have to return to Lòn Haven – and to The Longing – to find out.

I really loved the way that history and folklore is woven through every strand of this book. Like all good folk tales, there are a number of elements (such as the re-emergence of a still-seven-year-old Clover) that require you to suspend your disbelief and just roll with the story, but it is the premise for a brilliant mystery that is founded upon the (very real) history of the Scottish witch trials and the appalling fate of many of the the Scottish ‘witches’. C. J. Cooke has very cleverly woven this folklore into a tale of contemporary life – of mother/daughter tension, teenage rebellion, the bond between sisters, and the fraught paths that young women navigate as they move from childhood to adolescence and beyond.

Whilst I did initially find the structure a little confusing – the book switches between Luna in the present day, the perspectives of Liv and Sapphire in 1998, and a third, older perspective with some characters appearing across multiple timelines – perseverance paid off and I became thoroughly engrossed in the mystery of Lòn Haven and in discovering exactly what had happened to Liv, Sapphire, Luna, and Clover all those years ago.

C. J. Cooke perfectly realises the isolated loneliness of The Longing and infuses even the smallest of gestures and symbols with a creeping atmosphere of suspicion and claustrophobia – which makes for an intense and page-turning reading experience! Characters are also really well conveyed – from Liv’s watchful desperation to the haughty resentment and anxiety of teenager Sapphire, I really felt as if I was in their shoes when reading. And whilst many of the characters make what can be termed ‘poor life choices’, I felt really sympathy for the predicaments that they found themselves within – and for their inadvertent entanglement with forces beyond their control.

I did have a couple of issues with the logic of The Lighthouse Witches at times. I find it quite hard to believe that any police force or social services team would release a seven-year-old child so soon after her rediscovery – especially since this little girl has been missing for two decades, can’t explain where she’s been, and apparently hasn’t aged a day. At times like this, the magical elements of the story don’t quite line up with the realism of the situation and, for a moment or two, it jolted me out of the world of the novel. This is, I admit, logical nit-picking – as I said at the start of this review, folk tales often require you to suspend your disbelief and, as this novel uses folklore for much of its base, its unsurprising to find that the book requires the occasional leap of faith from its readers. But if you do like all your plotlines wrapped up with logical explanations, consider yourself forewarned.

Overall, however, I found The Lighthouse Witches to be a compelling, unsettling, and enchanting read. C. J. Cooke has expertly woven folklore and history into her contemporary tale to create a modern thriller suffused with the claustrophobic and chilling atmosphere of a classic Gothic novel. With its wonderfully evocative setting and relatable, flawed characters, The Lighthouse Witches provided a page-turning and atmospheric read that is sure to delight fans of Cooke’s previous work – and to garner her plenty of new ones too.

First things first can we talk about the cover? Literally gorgeous wow I love it.
The writing style was also on point and I loved the setting.
I haven’t really connected much to the characters, but it probably changes from reader to reader.
All in all it’s a nice book!

I liked The Lighthouse Witches very much — I started reading it one afternoon and stayed up until 1:30 to finish it! Wonderfully atmospheric and cleverly plotted — a little too cleverly at times, there was a tangle towards the end of the book where I couldn't make sense of one of the character's movements and I had to go back to work out who was where and when. That aside, I would highly recommend the book, particularly as a gothic autumn read.

This book wasn't really for me. The change of character point of view was really off putting, but the writing style was really nice. Unfortunately, I just couldn't get invested.