Wildwood Whispers, the first book by author Barbara J. Hancock written under the pseudonym Willa Reece, transports readers to the Appalachian wilderness in a fast-paced and compelling novel filled with magic and female bonds.
Mel Smith and Sarah Ross were chosen sisters, having pinky sworn their sisterhood in one of the many foster homes they shared over the course of their childhood. They shared everything together--until Sarah is killed as a young adult in a freak car accident, and Mel is left untethered and unmoored, with nothing to do but fulfill her final promise to Sarah: return Sarah's ashes to her hometown in the western Virginia mountains, to be buried in the very same mountain garden where Sarah once found her mother's murdered body.
This task sets Wildwood Whispers in motion, as Mel returns to Sarah's hometown of Morgan's Gap and finds herself increasingly drawn into the small town's strange landscape. Taken in by Granny, the town's resident wisewoman, Mel learns the ways of the herbs that Sarah and her herbalist mother knew. But the wildwood, as the locals call the hundreds of miles of Appalachian wilderness that surround the town, is known for drawing people in, not for letting them go. What starts as a simple task to honor a dead sister's last wish becomes a much larger, more daunting undertaking. The wildwood is a looming, omnipresent entity on every page of the darkly atmospheric Wildwood Whispers. Infused with Appalachian lore, traditions of herbal medicine and the power of nature, Reece's novel is a story of womanhood and sisterhood, and the strength inherent in both. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm