A Few of My Favorite Paranormal Novels

Edited with New additions to my paranormal favorites (2023)

The Shapeshifter's Guide to Time Travel by  Mark Budman

Rose, an 18-year-old American time traveler, comes to the totalitarian Temnota as an exchange student. Many people in this country are Talents—the shape-shifters. Rose finds out that a captured rebel leader is locked up in a high-security prison, awaiting execution. Without their leader, the rebels will be annihilated. Rose can travel in time without any machine, and she can transport people with her. She takes her classmate and friend Gavrilo, the prince of the good Talents, back to the past to find a way to free the prisoner. The Senior Major of the country’s Secret Service, the king of all evil Talents, stands in their way. Rose and Gavrilo fall in love while fighting him, and now their resolve and commitment are tested in battle.

First up is friend and crit partner's release Remembrance by Rita Woods. It is a fantasy take on the underground railroad. You can read my interview with her here: https://bloodredpencil.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-path-to-publication-with-rita-woods.html

Remembrance…It’s a rumor, a whisper passed in the fields and veiled behind sheets of laundry. A hidden stop on the underground road to freedom, a safe haven protected by more than secrecy…if you can make it there. Ohio, present day. An elderly woman who is more than she seems warns against rising racism as a young nurse grapples with her life. Haiti, 1791, on the brink of revolution. When the slave Abigail is forced from her children to take her mistress to safety, she discovers New Orleans has its own powers. 1857 New Orleans—a city of unrest: Following tragedy, house girl Margot is sold just before her promised freedom. Desperate, she escapes and chases a whisper.... Remembrance. 

I am looking forward to her new release in 2022, The Last Dreamwalker. Loved, loved, loved the early drafts. Rita has one of the most amazing narrative voices I have ever read. This book has been released and it is just as good as I hoped. Layla Hurley returns to the Gullah islands where she must face off with a crazed ancestor in a fight in each other's dreams. Five stars.

Follow Rita Woods on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Rita-Woods/e/B07ZXLWBRV/r

I am not usually one for zombie stories or civil war tales, but I love Justina Ireland's narrative voice and adored her main character, Jane, in Dread Nation and its sequel Deathless Divide. 

Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—derailing the War Between the States and changing the nation forever. In this new America, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Education Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead. But there are also opportunities—and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It's a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations. But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston's School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose. I have not read her backlist, but there are quite a few to choose from including tales from the Star Wars franchise. I look forward to more fiction from her pen.

Follow Justina Ireland on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Justina-Ireland/e/B009BXOJ1S

Natasha Mostert's Season of the Witch is one of my favorite witch tales of all time.  

A computer hacker, Gabriel Blackstone is also a remote viewer who can read other people's minds. Asked to find a friend's son, he enters the orbit of the mysterious Monk sisters. But he uses his gift only reluctantly, until he is contacted by an ex-lover who begs him to find her stepson, last seen months earlier in a mysterious house in Chelsea. Gabriel becomes increasingly bewitched by the house, and by its owners, the beautiful and mysterious Monk sisters. Morrighan and Minnaloushe are direct descendants of Elizabethan occultist John Dee. Gabriel knows one is a killer, but which one?

In The Midnight Side, Isa de Witt receives a phone call from her cousin Alette, only to fins she has been dead for two days. She travels to London to solve her cousin's murder and get revenge.

In Windwalker, Justine Calloway moves into a deserted English mansion and becomes obsessed with the family who lived there and they with her. 

In Dark Prayer, Jennilee suffers from dissociative memory disorder after witnessing the dramatic murder of her mother at the age of five. Her mother, Julianne, together with four friends, were working on strange scientific experiments involving the manipulation of memory molecules. Jennilee’s fugue state manifests another entity named Eloise. Can she learn to control the voices in her head and unlock the secrets from her past?

I highly recommend them all. Follow Natasha Mostert on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Natasha-Mostert/e/B000APMG9I?

I am a bit late to the game, but I finally got around to reading the books in Alice Hoffman's Practical Magic series.  I had watched the star-studded movie, but the books are much richer and span several generations of Owens women. For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally have endured that fate as well: as children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their musty house and their exotic concoctions and their crowd of black cats. But all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape. One will do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they share will bring them back—almost as if by magic.

The second book in the series is The Rules of Magic. For the Owens family, love is a curse that began in 1620, when Maria Owens was charged with witchery for loving the wrong man. Hundreds of years later, in New York City at the cusp of the sixties, when the whole world is about to change, Susanna Owens knows that her three children are dangerously unique. Difficult Franny, with skin as pale as milk and blood red hair, shy and beautiful Jet, who can read other people’s thoughts, and charismatic Vincent, who began looking for trouble on the day he could walk. From the start Susanna sets down rules for her children: No walking in the moonlight, no red shoes, no wearing black, no cats, no crows, no candles, no books about magic. And most importantly, never, ever, fall in love. But when her children visit their Aunt Isabelle, in the small Massachusetts town where the Owens family has been blamed for everything that has ever gone wrong, they uncover family secrets and begin to understand the truth of who they are. Yet, the children cannot escape love even if they try, just as they cannot escape the pains of the human heart. The two beautiful sisters will grow up to be the memorable aunts in Practical Magic, while Vincent, their beloved brother, will leave an unexpected legacy.

The third book in the series is Magic Lessons which traces the centuries-old curse to its source, Maria Owens, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, and matriarch of a line of the amazing Owens women. In the 1600s, Maria is abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. Under the care of Hannah Owens, Maria learns about the “Nameless Arts.” Hannah recognizes that Maria has a gift and she teaches the girl all she knows. It is here that she learns her first important lesson: Always love someone who will love you back. When Maria is abandoned by the man who has declared his love for her, she follows him to Salem, Massachusetts. Here she invokes the curse that will haunt her family. And it’s here that she learns the rules of magic and the lesson that she will carry with her for the rest of her life. Love is the only thing that matters.

The fourth book in the series, The Book of Magic was released this year. You can read my review of it here: 

https://bloodredpencil.blogspot.com/2021/04/magic-lessons-by-alice-hoffman.html

The Owens family has been cursed in matters of love for over three-hundred years but all of that is about to change. The novel begins in a library, the best place for a story to be conjured, when beloved aunt Jet Owens hears the deathwatch beetle and knows she has only seven days to live. Jet is not the only one in danger—the curse is already at work. A frantic attempt to save a young man’s life spurs three generations of the Owens women, and one long-lost brother, to use their unusual gifts to break the curse as they travel from Paris to London to the English countryside where their ancestor Maria Owens first practiced the Unnamed Art. The younger generation discovers secrets that have been hidden from them in matters of both magic and love by Sally, their fiercely protective mother. As Kylie Owens uncovers the truth about who she is and what her own dark powers are, her aunt Franny comes to understand that she is ready to sacrifice everything for her family, and Sally Owens realizes that she is willing to give up everything for love.

Hoffman has an extensive back list. I have not read all of them yet, but am working on it. 

Follow Alice Hoffman on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Alice-Hoffman/e/B000AQ05CC

 

Brenna Yovanoff was one of my serendipitous finds. Her books are quirky and captivating and include: 

The Replacement  Mackie Doyle is The Replacement - left in the crib of a human baby sixteen years ago. He has been raised among us. But he is not one of us. Now, he must face the dark creatures of the slag heaps from which he came and find his rightful place - in our world or theirs.

The Space Between  Everything burns in Pandemonium, a city in Hell made of chrome and steel, where there is no future and life is an expanse of frozen time. That's where Daphne--the daughter of Lilith and Lucifer--waits, wondering what lies in store for her. Will she become a soulless demon like her sisters? Or follow in the footsteps of her brother Obie, whose life is devoted to saving lost souls on Earth? But when Obie saves a troubled boy named Truman from the brink of death and then goes missing, Daphne is catapulted on a mission to Earth, with Truman as her guide. As Daphne and Truman search for Obie, they discover what it means to love and be human in a world where human is the hardest thing to be.

Paper Valentine For Hannah, the summer is a complicated one.  Her best friend Lillian died six months ago, and Hannah just wants her life to go back to normal. But how can things be normal when Lillian’s ghost is haunting her bedroom, pushing her to investigate the mysterious string of murders?  Hannah’s just trying to understand why her friend self-destructed, and where she fits now that Lillian isn’t there to save her a place among the social elite. And she must stop thinking about Finny Boone, the big, enigmatic delinquent whose main hobbies seem to include petty larceny and surprising acts of kindness. With the entire city in a panic, Hannah soon finds herself drawn into a world of ghost girls and horrifying secrets.  She realizes that only by confronting the Valentine Killer will she be able move on with her life—and it’s up to her to put together the pieces before he strikes again.

Fiendish When Clementine was a child, dangerous and inexplicable things started happening in New South Bend. The townsfolk blamed the fiendish people out in the Willows and burned their homes to the ground. But magic kept Clementine alive, walled up in the cellar for ten years, until a boy named Fisher sets her free. Back in the world, Clementine sets out to discover what happened all those years ago. But the truth gets muddled in her dangerous attraction to Fisher, the politics of New South Bend, and the Hollow, a fickle and terrifying place that seems increasingly temperamental ever since Clementine reemerged.

Her stories are modern-day fables reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm. The plots are slight, but her glorious use of language and description makes up for that. Paper Valentine was my least favorite. The other three I could not put down.

She has written a prequel for the Max character from the Netflix Stranger Things television series titled Stranger Things: Runaway Max. This must-read novel, explores Max's past, the good and the bad, as well as how she came to find her newfound sense of home in Hawkins, Indiana

Follow Brenna Yovanoff on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Brenna-Yovanoff/e/B003VKZBT6/

Now that the Christmas gifts have been opened and it's time to begin a new year of reading, hopefully you received gift money to get a head start on your TBR pile.  

Join in me 2022 for more educational articles on the craft of writing and books to add to your reading list.

Check out my Story Building Blocks series and website for the writer in your life at www.dianahurwitz.com. There are many free tools, articles, and forms to get you started on your writing journey or dig you out of a hole if you become stuck.

And though it lacks magic, practical or otherwise, pick up the Mythikas Island series for the adventure

lover. Diana, Persephone, Aphrodite, and Athena undergo a survival exercise on a deserted island to earn a seat on the ruling council of Mt. Olympus.

Follow me on Amazon for more books on the craft of writing: https://www.amazon.com/Diana-Hurwitz/e/B002BOC3HQ