I finished and enjoyed both The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George and Sparrow's Song by @Marilee Aufdenkamp and now I'm reading our group read, The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer. I'm close to halfway through and it's great so far! What are you reading? It's two weeks until our Zoom chat about The Witching Tide. Have you got your hands on it yet?

Even well-loved, super-popular, award-winning books have their serious haters! 😂 This is historical fiction. All guesses are encouraged (no googling, though!). This is meant to be fun. Don't be dismayed if you disagree with the review. Any spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors are copied directly from the review. I’ll post the correct answer tomorrow (20th August 2026). ⭐ I’m sure many love this, though I’m not sure how, after being incessantly beaten around the face by racism for over 1000 pages. I’d love there to be at least a feminist angle but I couldn’t see it. Just racism, a triumph of a individualism and a woman with the emotional intelligence and compassion of a spoilt 2-year-old. In 1000 pages [Character Name] undergoes an incredible character arc, from an immature, ignorant, shallow, self-centred, grasping, manipulative back-stabber, into a mature, ignorant, shallow, self-centred, grasping, manipulative back-stabber. I could deconstruct the racism, but I’m sure others have done it already. It’s exhausting and dispiriting. The whole this is just a racist wet dream. Two things to note: 1. This was not ‘of its time’. It was written 70 years after the end of the civil war and the abolition of slavery. An equivalent would be a Nazi apologist novel written in 2015. 2. This is not just the characters’ thoughts and words, though lord knows they are bad enough. This is a third person omniscient narrator. ⭐ What do you think? What's the book? (In this case, if you can think of only the title, but not the author, that's ok!)