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A searing take on femininity and power, Marrow transports readers to a small island off the coast of Maine, where a coven has done the seemingly impossible.
The day Oona was kicked out of her mother's coven, she gave up on her dreams of harnessing the witchcraft that was her birthright. Years later, she's carved out an ordinary life with her husband, though she is filled with a longing she can barely name. If she could only become a mother, then—according to island lore—she will come into her magic.
But after years of being unable to carry a pregnancy to term, Oona begins to feel desperate. Without the money to seek medical treatment, she decides she must return to the rugged, windswept island where she was raised—and to her dark, enigmatic mother...a witch who gives childless women the chance to become mothers.
Oona returns under the cover of anonymity, hoping for an answer. But, despite a celebrity clientele and a long wait-list, there are dark forces at work on the island, and as her time there grows more harrowing, the truth threatens to come to light. How far will Oona go to access the power her mother commands?
Tender and intense, witchy and wise, and written in prose that glitters and seethes, Marrow is a gripping novel about the complex bonds between mothers and daughters, about what we must believe in order to imagine a future for ourselves, and what we must let go in order to fully live it.
"Shea debuts with a spellbinding tale of magic and motherhood centered on 30-something hopeful mother Oona...it has plenty to say about what it means to be a mother and it delivers a shocking twist. This potent concoction gets the job done." —Publishers Weekly
" The first half of the novel is a frustrating combination of convoluted and slow. Once Oona begins to uncover some dark secrets at the fertility center, though, Shea finds her footing and the reader will mostly be hooked." —Kirkus Reviews
"Marrow is a novel with its own weather, an entrancing and eerie tale of longing, regret, and secrets, with a revelation that continues to haunt me." —Megha Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning
"This haunting novel swims in the deep, murky water of motherhood, friendship, circles of care and the shadows that hover beneath and between the most hopeful of projects. Life is never only a miracle—it is also heartbreak, despair and betrayal. Marrow is rich and complicated and very, very real." —Ramona Ausubel, bestselling author of The Last Animal
This information about Marrow was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Samantha Browning Shea is an author and the vice president of Georges Borchardt, Inc. literary agency. A graduate of Colgate University, Samantha lives in Connecticut with her husband and their two daughters. Marrow is her debut novel.
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