Book Review: The Memory Witch, by Heather Topham Wood

The Memory Witch

By Heather Topham Wood

Published December 2013 by Crescent Moon Press

About the Book (from Goodreads):

Ten years ago, Quinn Jacobs’ mother made a bargain with a local witch—steal away Quinn’s memories from the first eight years of her life and in return, Quinn would spend a year in servitude to the witch.

On Quinn’s eighteenth birthday, she’s forced to leave her home and friends behind. For the next year, she’ll live at the Chadwick House, learning everything she needs to know about being a spellcaster. As her powers grow, Quinn begins to unravel the secrets of the past and the reason her mother was so desperate to conceal the horrifying truth

MY TAKE:

In this New Adult tale of secrets and magic, Heather Topham Wood weaves a story that will both spellbind and repulse, but will certainly keep you reading through to the bitter end.

Something happened to Quinn when she was young. Something so bad that her mother bargained away a year of her daughter’s life to have a witch erase all of the memories.

When the witch arrives to collect on the debt, Quinn is plunged into a world she never knew existed. With the help of the witch's hot nephew Mason, Quinn navigates her way through her internship, and makes a deal with witch Stella to recover those missing memories.

Reader be warned, this story is at times very dark and Quinn's disturbing memories might be better served forgotten for good. The rest of the story was involving, interesting, and well worth the read.

About the Author:

Heather Topham Wood’s obsession with novels began in childhood while growing up in a shore town in New Jersey. Writing since her teens, she recently returned to penning novels after a successful career as a freelance writer. She’s the author of the paranormal romance Second Sight series and the standalone The Disappearing Girl .

Heather graduated from the College of New Jersey in 2005 and holds a bachelor's degree in English. Her freelance work has appeared in publications such as USA Today, Livestrong.com, Outlook by the Bay and Step in Style magazine. She resides in Trenton, New Jersey with her husband and two sons. Besides writing, Heather is a pop culture fanatic and has an obsession with supernatural novels and TV shows.

Guest Author, Heather Topham Wood

Please join me in welcoming Heather to my blog today, as she talks about her journey to publication! 

Her new release THE MEMORY WITCH is available now online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com.

The Guts and the Glory of NaNoWriMo

by Heather Topham Wood

If you’re involved in the book world in any capacity, then NaNoWriMo is likely familiar to you. National Novel Writing Month comes every November and forces many authors to buckle down and get that novel done. Last year was the first time I attempted NaNoWriMo and I can’t rave enough about what an awesome experience it was for me.

Preparing for NaNoWriMo should take place at least a few weeks in advance. I’m not much of a plotter and my preparation for last year’s event consisted of writing down a few basic ideas on scraps of paper. I already had a series I was working on, but I decided to take the month to try something completely new. This gave birth to the idea of a YA paranormal romance series that begins with The Memory Witch.

The thing about NaNoWriMo is that meeting your daily word count becomes a game. And if you have a competitive personality like I do, you don’t want to lose. My house may have been a disaster for a month and we may have eaten takeout every night, but I did meet my word count goal every single day.

You also receive a ton of encouragement along the way. I met a lot of new authors through NaNoWriMo and it was great to cheer each other along. I swapped excerpts and asked for help when I got stuck.

What else do I love about NaNoWriMo? You feel bad *ss after. You can’t beat the feeling of knowing you wrote an entire book in a month. The book may not be polished or near being publishable, but you have 50,000 more words than you had November 1st. The months following NaNoWriMo is when you can take your time reviewing and revising everything you wrote.

My advice is not to rush off queries once November 30th rolls around. Get the book completely ready before approaching agents and publishers about your manuscript. The great thing about my NaNoWriMo piece is I was able to find a publisher. A year later and The Memory Witch is now being published through Crescent Moon Press.   

About the Book:

Ten years ago, Quinn Jacobs’ mother made a bargain with a local witch—steal away Quinn’s memories from the first eight years of her life and in return, Quinn would spend a year in servitude to the witch.

On Quinn’s eighteenth birthday, she’s forced to leave her home and friends behind. For the next year, she’ll live at the Chadwick House, learning everything she needs to know about being a spellcaster. As her powers grow, Quinn begins to unravel the secrets of the past and the reason her mother was so desperate to conceal the horrifying truth.

About the Author:

Heather Topham Wood’s obsession with novels began in childhood while growing up in a shore town in New Jersey. Writing since her teens, she recently returned to penning novels after a successful career as a freelance writer. She’s the author of the paranormal romance Second Sight series and the standalone The Disappearing Girl .

Heather graduated from the College of New Jersey in 2005 and holds a bachelor's degree in English. Her freelance work has appeared in publications such as USA Today, Livestrong.com, Outlook by the Bay and Step in Style magazine. She resides in Trenton, New Jersey with her husband and two sons. Besides writing, Heather is a pop culture fanatic and has an obsession with supernatural novels and TV shows.

Twitter: Heather's Twitter Account
Blog: Heather's Book Chatter
Facebook: Heather Topham Wood's Author Page

Amazon: Heather Topham Wood Author

Cover Reveal! THE MEMORY WITCH by Heather Topham Wood

I'm so excited to be part of this cover reveal today for fellow CMP author Heather Topham Wood! What a gorgeous cover - and the book sounds really cool, too! Heather has shared the blurb and an excerpt with us, as well as her links so you can find out more about the author and her story!

This book will be released in two weeks on December 15th! I'm excited to read and review it - heading over to Goodreads right now to add it to my TBR list!

About the Book:

Ten years ago, Quinn Jacobs’ mother made a bargain with a local witch—steal away Quinn’s memories from the first eight years of her life and in return, Quinn would spend a year in servitude to the witch.

On Quinn’s eighteenth birthday, she’s forced to leave her home and friends behind. For the next year, she’ll live at the Chadwick House, learning everything she needs to know about being a spellcaster. As her powers grow, Quinn begins to unravel the secrets of the past and the reason her mother was so desperate to conceal the horrifying truth.

Publication Date: December 15, 2013

Publisher: Crescent Moon Press

Add to Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18248374-memory-witch

Excerpt from MEMORY WITCH, by Heather Topham Wood:

I didn’t have a single remembrance before the age of eight. The first day of kindergarten, losing my first tooth, my first best friend—these memories vanished into an unexplained chasm and were still missing ten years later.

My mother would never explain the root of this anomaly to me. The only thing she’d say is that losing my father that year did something irreversible to my brain. A crater opened up inside of me and every early memory fell into oblivion.

I had eight years with my father before he died—but I didn’t have one memory of him. I didn’t know what it felt like to be inside of his embrace. I had no recollection of the scent I breathed in when he gathered me up into his arms. I had to imagine the memories through a haphazard collage of photographs and videos left behind.

My father was murdered in a fumbled burglary attempt at our home. My mother told me I should be grateful we weren’t home that night because we would be six feet under right alongside him. The ice in her voice made me wonder if she blamed him in some way for being killed.

Mere weeks after we laid him to rest, we moved two hours away from our New Jersey hometown to Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. A visit to his final resting place was a rare occurrence and we were estranged from my father’s side of the family. The part that I always had a hard time wrapping my head around was that my father’s unsolved murder never plagued my mother. She never sought out the killer to exact justice for taking a father away from his young daughter.

She insisted we needed a fresh start. And for ten years, I lived a seemingly normal teenage existence with the exception of my unique case of amnesia. My mother never brought me to a team of doctors to analyze my brain and she has never pushed me to remember. I comprehended the oddities surrounding my life, but we’d lived this way for so long that it became normal.

Until the day that everything changed.

Heather Topham Wood
Content Writer and Novelist
Twitter: Heather's Twitter Account
Blog: Heather's Book Chatter
Facebook: Heather Topham Wood's Author Page