Overview

In Massachusetts, in the years between witchcraft delusion and Revolution, a curious, insightful Tamsin Bennett comes of age apprenticed to her Grandmother Cat, child of a healer-mystic accused of witchery. When Tamsin is stricken one morning with unearthly visions of her Papa, that day inexplicably he is found dead. Now keeping a tavern in a harbor town, she hides in plain sight to carry on the healing work of her foremothers, protects her family from danger, and chooses her lovers with particular care.

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Reviews

In her debut novel The Rowans, Beverly Cooper Pierce brings a slice of history out of the shadows, vividly illuminating the day-to-day lives of women in the New England of the 1750s, lives spent working a remote farm by the mill or keeping an inn for wayfarers in a busy harbor town. For her heroine, growing into womanhood in a culture of religious intolerance and rigidity, it is a time of peril and tension given the special powers and gifts she possesses, inheritances from her forbears that must be kept secret. Can she survive? Can she find love? Especially delightful in The Rowans is the author's eye for authentic detail: she puts the reader two centuries and more back in time. Rod Kessler, Off in Zimbabwe The Rowans is historical fiction at its best, magical realism present throughout, a true work of art. The characters are captivating. The storyline of The Rowans, riveting, brought me to laughter, tears, and pure awe. At times, it's as uplifting as it is heart-wrenching. Beverly Cooper Pierce is an accomplished writer who immerses us in the language, landscape, foods, habits, and medicinal tinctures of the pre-Revolutionary period, through years of research into her own family history and that of others in this gem of a novel. The Rowans takes us on an epic adventure, so rich in detail we're unlikely to put it down, spellbound in a beautifully written, compelling story. Lora DeVore, Darkness Was My Candle: An Odyssey of Survival and Grace

Author Information

Beverly Cooper Pierce has been an academic librarian, registered nurse in the field of holistic care, family historian, and professional writer, all braiding now into her debut novel, The Rowans. Growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, she had no idea that John and Elizabeth Proctor, both convicted of witchcraft in 1692, were her seven-times great-grandparents, or that some of the oldest houses in towns along the coast held stories of her father's family. After living in Minnesota many years and bringing two sons into the next generation, she now lives and writes north of Boston on Cape Ann, where the bones of her novel are familial and real. She is at work on a sequel set in Maine.

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