TUESDAY INTROS/TEASER TUESDAYS — WITCH WOMAN — MARCH 27

 

Today I’ll be participating again in First Chapter First Paragraph, hosted by Diane, at Bibliophile by the Sea. 

I’ll also be spotlighting the excerpt in Teaser Tuesdays, at Should Be Reading.

Today I’m featuring one of this week’s books:  Witch Woman, by Jeanette Baker.

About: 

In two different centuries, four hundred years apart, the lives of Abigail March and her daughter, Maggie, play out along parallel lines, both women blessed and cursed by a selective birthright and marked with a startling mutation, heterochromia iridium, one brown eye, the other blue.

In 1692 Abigail and three-year-old Maggie, are accused of witchcraft. Most women who found themselves facing the hangman’s noose during this shameful time are innocent. Abigail is not. Summoning her powers, she sends her child through a time portal into twentieth century Salem.

Maggie grows to maturity knowing nothing of her birthright until her foster mother’s death bed confession. Using her clairvoyant abilities and the medium of an ancient spinning wheel, she resurrects her past through a series of troubling dreams.
Meanwhile Abigail locates the time portal and slips through, changing her identity, hoping to find her child and bring her home through the narrowing portal.

Unknown to both women are the dangers of the old world’s dark forces, a swiftly narrowing time portal, and a missing child who desperately needs Maggie’s “sight” a sight that continues to blur as her ties to old Salem strengthen.

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Opening Paragraphs:

Salem, Massachusetts, 1974:

Annie McBride leaned over the kitchen sink and glanced out the window of her cozy Cape Cod saltbox.  An odd, celery glow divided the dawn sky into streaky layers of green and gray.  She shivered and rubbed her arms against the October cold.  To save fuel costs, she’d closed off most of the upstairs rooms but the hallway heater took its time warming the kitchen, the parlor and the dining room.  The fireplace in her bedroom and a down comforter on the bed kept her warm at night but, try as she might, Annie couldn’t sleep past five, not since she’d laid Thomas in the ground three weeks before.

It wasn’t fair, she thought, steeling herself against the pain, so familiar now that she feared it would never leave her.  Fifty-six was still young.  Men didn’t die in their fifties anymore, not men who kept themselves fit and lean, men who didn’t smoke or drink or worry much more than they should about bills or politics or job security.    Cared-for men lived well into their seventies and eighties.  But, even though the odds were with him, Thomas hadn’t.

***

Teaser:  Laurie Cabot, Salem’s Wicca high priestess, sat behind the glass in her shop window, passing a shuttle through her loom.  Annie nodded and would have passed without stopping but Laurie waved her to the door.

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What do you think about these snippets?  Would you keep reading?  What have your shared today?  Come on by and leave your comments and links.