Review: Willa Reece’s WILDWOOD WHISPERS.

Thanks to the publisher for the complimentary finished copy. All opinions my own.

🏔 Q: what are your fave mountains? I live a little over an hour away from the Great Smoky Mountains.

Before reading Willa Reece’s Wildwood Whispers I saw that it was blurbed by Sarah Addison Allen (!) & compared to Alice Hoffman’s work (!) & I was so excited to take a look for myself. In its pages is a story brimming with loss & love & community, a story with secrets & magic & the impossible made possible.

Foster kids Mel Smith & Sarah Ross are like sisters growing up. Mel has never met her birth family but Sarah lived in Morgan’s Gap until her mother was murdered when she was a preteen.

It’s years later & Sarah has been killed in a hit & run. Mel must do what she promised Sarah: return her ashes to the mountains of Morgan’s Gap. But as soon as she arrives she meets Granny, a local wisewoman, & against her every preservation instinct—which insists that she not get too close—she’s pulled onto a path that takes her someplace different.

Something that could offer her more than the life she’s been living. But will she pursue even more?

Soft & at times violent, nurturing & at times painful, Wildwood Whispers is often like the wildwoods themselves—which border the Ross cabin where Mel stays & give wisewomen & villagers so much.

But as they say in the story, death is part of them as well, & Mel wonders who killed Sarah’s mother & maybe Sarah too.

This book is a lovely & also occasionally jarring read that touched my Southern lit.-loving soul & I really enjoyed it. There’s a slow burn, kissing only (but the suggestion of something more) romance inside, too. Check this one out if you’re looking for something haunting & warm (that sounds contradictory but it’s true 😆).

4.5 ⭐️. Release date: 08/17

CW: reference to sexual abuse and harassment, trafficking, murder

[ID: a white woman wearing a yellow dress holds a copy of the book & reclines on a green wrought iron swing.]