It turns out she has living relatives, and her aunt is none other than the Hedgewitch, and she'll be going to live with her. For we are witches, one and all,Īnd courage true as steel! Thank you so much to NetGalley and Welbeck Flame, an imprint of Welbeck Children’s Limited, for the opportunity to read this book.Ĭhild neglect, bullying, grief, loss of a parent, kidnapping, human trafficking, mention of slaveryĬassie Morgan has been for seven years at an awful boarding school when she recieves news that, for legal reasons, her mother is supposed as dead. Magic I most wish was real: Spoon of Eternal Pudding. I’m keen to join Cassie as she continues to search for her mother and am looking forward to coming face to creepy bone mask with the Erl King. Hedgely has many stores I want to explore further in future books but none as much as Marchpane’s, where I’ll be eating when Mrs Briggs goes on strike, and Widdershin’s, a Tardis bookstore. Joining Montague in the ranks of practically perfect in every way is Mrs Briggs, who smells of gingerbread and is welcome to cook for me whenever she wants. Montague, though? A mixture of wisdom and cattitude, Montague is perfect already. We’ve gone to work with the Hedgewitch but I suspect her page time will increase as the series continues and we’ll get to see what she’s truly capable of. Rue and Tabitha have the makings of being both supportive friends to Cassie and good teammates. While Ivy has the potential for complexity due to both her personality and home life, so far she’s mostly sycophantic. The pain she feels as a result of her mother’s absence is always there but, despite this, Cassie has an unshakeable optimism. Once she arrives in Hedgely, some things come naturally to her but she struggles with others. When we join twelve year old Cassie at Fowell House, she’s an outcast whose primary escape when she’s perfecting her invisibility is reading. Being a new series, there were so many new people and non-humans to meet. The first in a five book series, Hedgewitch was a lot of fun. It turns out the stories Cassie has been reading about faeries shouldn’t have been filed under fiction, and witchcraft? It’s real, too. When Cassie runs away from her boarding school, a talking cat named Montague accompanies her to Hedgely, where she meets the family she never knew existed. Cassie never imagined she would still be waiting for her seven years later, behind the bars of Fowell House, with its questionable food, detestable teachers, a headmistress who’d give the Trunchbull a run for her money and the bullies on the hockey team.

All Cassie Morgan has to remember her mother by is a mysterious key and the promise she made that she would wait for her.

Hedgewitch by Skye McKenna