The Witch by Freida McFadden
Every night at 3:41 in the morning, the grandfather clock in the parlour at Pemberton stops. A repairman was brought all the way out from town and found nothing wrong with it. The groundskeeper’s wristwatch stops at the same minute. He winds the clock again each morning without comment, the way you would refill a bird feeder. That is the first fact The Witch by Freida McFadden hands you about the house Julia Barlow has just moved into. The novel then spends four hundred pages making the answer worth waiting for. How The Witch by Freida McFadden Works Two narrators, alternating, in chapters mostly three or four pages long. In the present, Julia is twenty-seven, newly laid off from a nonprofit tutoring job, evicted, and driving to northern Massachusetts to help care for a grandmother whose memory is going. Pemberton was built in 1660 and has been in the family since. It has a bear’s head for a door knocker, an attic reached by alternating-tread stairs that her grandmother once told her were built to …
