Witch Pie Books

Alice Hoffman's Nightbird was one of a few magical baking novels read in the summer of 2016 that led me to Year of Pie.   As it is an enchanting novel featuring pies, gardens, birds and witches, a re-read felt like just the right thing to bridge year of pie and witch year. The YA novel is still highly recommended.

A quick Amazon search led to Witch's Pie, a self-published children's book that didn't do much for me and two series that I need to investigate: M. Z. Andrew's Witch Squad Cozy Mysteries, including one entitled Witch Pie and Ellery Adams' Charmed Pie Shoppe Mysteries, which includes Pies and Prejudice.  Having been disappointed by Joanne Fluke's Blackberry Pie Murder, I'm not running out to buy any more baking mysteries, even if they do include witches, but if someone had a copy lying around . . . 

Rats, no pie, but lots of fun

Good book-- but that's not amaranth.

Meanwhile, at my local library, searching "witch pie" yields The Brixen Witch by Stacy DeKeyser.  I checked it out, baffled how a rat-infested re-telling of the pied piper would have anything to do with baked goods.  It was some time before I realized that "pied" includes PIE whether or not baked goods are involved (and I just now realized I could have been looking at pied-billed grebes and pied flycatchers during the bird to pie transition last year).  I enjoyed the book and will be adding the Brixen witch herself to my upcoming descriptions of witches.

Somewhere in the last week or two I also read The Amaranth Enchantment by Julia Berry, a very nice fairy tale that would have been made much nicer if the cover art included amaranth for the amaranth witch rather than an amaryllis (or an odd orchid).  True, the amaryllis is more to look at, but it is no "love-lies-bleeding" and many readers (well, at least this reader) would know that. 

I also finished Ruth Chew's The Wednesday Witch, which, while very pleasant about a witch getting mistaken for a vacuum cleaning repair woman in 1960s Brooklyn, is no What the Witch Left, which is one of my childhood favorites, also by Ruth Chew.

So I've worn witchy clothes at least once a week, I said "no" to a committee I didn't want to serve on, I've read three witch-pie books, two other witch books and ate lots of garlic with The Mister for Valentine's Day.  The year is off to a good start.