Suped Up: The Sparrow Sisters by Ellen Herrick

Series: TBA
Format: eGalley
Release Date: September 1, 2015
Publisher: William Morrow 
Source: Publisher via Edelweiss
Genre: Contemporary Women's Lit | Magic Realism

With echoes of the alchemy of Practical Magic, the lushness of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, and the darkly joyful wickedness of the Witches of East End, Ellen Herrick’s debut novel spins an enchanting love story about a place where magic whispers just beneath the surface and almost anything is possible, if you aren’t afraid to listen

The Sparrow sisters are as tightly woven into the seaside New England town of Granite Point as the wild sweet peas that climb the stone walls along the harbor. Sorrel, Nettie and Patience are as colorful as the beach plums on the dunes and as mysterious as the fog that rolls into town at dusk.

Patience is the town healer and when a new doctor settles into Granite Point he brings with him a mystery so compelling that Patience is drawn to love him, even as she struggles to mend him. But when Patience Sparrow’s herbs and tinctures are believed to be implicated in a local tragedy, Granite Point is consumed by a long-buried fear—and its three hundred year old history resurfaces as a modern day witch-hunt threatens. The plants and flowers, fruit trees and high hedges begin to wither and die, and the entire town begins to fail; fishermen return to the harbor empty-handed, and blight descends on the old elms that line the lanes.

It seems as if Patience and her town are lost until the women of Granite Point band together to save the Sparrow. As they gather, drawing strength from each other, will they be able to turn the tide and return life to Granite Point?

The Sparrow Sisters is a beautiful, haunting, and thoroughly mesmerizing novel that will capture your imagination.

THE SPARROW SISTERS are enchanting and a curious bunch to say the least. They've been one of the founding families of Granite Point, and most of the seaside townsfolk are reverent of the Sisters, if not fascinated by them and what they can do. To say that the Sisters have green thumbs are an understatement, the plants that they grow in their Nursery and home garden are lush and certainly magical. At the center of this novel is Patience, the youngest and the healer of the four Sparrows. Her touch can ease your pain and give you comfort, her tinctures are nothing short of miracle drugs, and her personality is akin to firecrackers. But will her healing magic give her love and joy, or will it bring her hearbreak and unbearable pain?

THE SPARROW SISTERS, Ellen Herrick's debut, stole my weekend and I don't mind it one bit! This novel is completely bewitching, it's magic realism at its finest, and the type of novel that will completely engulf you with from beginning to end. It's a charming storybook-like small town story that is rife with colorful characters, brimming with quiet romance, family, and friendship, and abundant with herbal trivia and magic. 

I fell in love with THE SPARROW SISTERS after the first three chapters, Patience and Dr. Henry Carlyle had me swooning in the middle, EHerrick broke my heart and had me close to sobbing at one point, but things ended in such a hopeful note in the end. Not just in terms of the conclusion, but also with the prospect of more books to come. 

THE SPARROW SISTERS is the perfect Fall read and highly recommended for fans of Sarah Addison Allen and Alice Hoffman.

More at Ellen Herrick's Website

Once there were four Sparrow Sisters. Everyone called them the Sisters, capitalized, and referred to them as a group, even when just one had come to the post office to collect the mail. “The Sisters are here for their package,” the postmistress would say, calling her clerk to the desk. Or, “What do you know, the Sisters are taking the train into the city.” All four had left Granite Point over the years on school trips to Boston and for the symphony or the museum, but they always came back; it was home. The only Sparrow sister who did leave town forever did so in the hardest way. The oldest Sparrow, if only by seven minutes, was Marigold, Sorrel’s twin. She was the real homebody, the one people still shook their heads over, and she actually left Granite Point just twice; the first time to accompany her father to a meeting with lawyers upon the death of her mother and the last upon her own death, in a smallish wooden box nestled inside an Adams’s Hardware bag on the arm of her twin. Sorrel took Marigold to the Outer Beach, past the break north of the seal colony, to scatter her ashes in the Atlantic.

Now there were only three Sparrows left in the house at the top of the hill overlooking the far harbor. Long ago this house that their great-great (and more) grandmother Clarissa Sparrow built had rung with the shouts and laughter of her four sons and the many Sparrow sons that followed. It was made of the timber used to craft the whaling fleet that sailed out from the harbor and into the dark waves. Her husband was a sea captain so fond of his trade that Clarissa chose wood from her father’s shipyard with the idea that if George Sparrow loved his boat so much, surely he would be called home to a house made of the very same wood. She’d even built a widow’s walk high above the street so that she could watch for him to sail back to her. Eventually, the widow’s walk would earn its name several times over.

By the time the Sparrow Sisters lived in the house on Ivy Street, lanes and hedges and other houses had grown up, blocking all but a narrow sliver of the deep blue water of Big Point Bay. Ivy House, as everyone called it, stood tall and white as it had for all those years, home to the last of the Sparrows altogether. The house was beautiful and spare with high ceilings and windows of wavy glass. It was most often filled with the flowers and herbs, vegetables and fruits of the Sparrow Sisters Nursery. Like their mother, Honor Sparrow, dead now for twenty-some years—gone on the very day her youngest daughter, Impatiens, arrived—the sisters all had green thumbs. It was ordained, really. They had each been named after a botanical, mostly flowers, and as their mother kept producing girls, the names became slightly ridiculous. But Honor was a keen gardener and in darkest winter, calling her daughter’s names reminded her that spring would come again. For months after her death the older girls hated their names and all they recalled for them. By the time they founded the Sparrow Sisters Nursery, though, each thoroughly embraced their names as the sign they were

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