![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Fallow half-sisters, all very different, have ties to their Somerset home, an old house steeped in family lore, imbued with ghosts, and subject to supernatural happenings. Bee, the oldest sister is the current caretaker of the house during the unexplained disappearance of the sisters' mother, Alys, who has been missing for a year. Bee's boyfriend, Dark, is somewhat unusual. Serena is a fashion designer, living in London with her teen daughter, and currently having unreliable boyfriend problems. Stella is a DJ, estranged from Bee at the beginning of the book, but on her way home from gigs in Ibiza to make amends. Luna has gone on the road in a horse drawn van with her traveller boyfriend, and is currently following a route she thinks her mother might have taken. They are all worried about their mother, while carrying on their own independent lives. We follow them, individually and together, as they experience strange happenings and encounter good and bad manifestations and put together clues that might lead them to find Alys.A comet is about to appear in the sky and when it does, things will change.
It's a female oriented book which is refreshing. I love the characters in this, the main and the supporting ones, especially the ghostly Dark, who is utterly intriguing, and the grandfather who is nothing but a (talking) blue flame hovering over his own grave. It starts out with a measured pace, but the supernatural elements are bang upfront as Bee gets a message from one of the trees in the orchard. This doesn't suffer from anyone keeping back information. Whatever the sisters learn, they share. The story unfolds through their individual and collective experiences. Marvellously magical. Highly Recommended.
I read this many years ago, and doubt that there will be many people who don't know the basic story of young Harry being taken from his unhappy life with relatives, the Dursleys, and deposited in the magical world of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry where he finds the life he was destined for, and begins to discover that he has a destiny which will pit him against Voldemort time and again over the course of his school life.