I received a copy of this book to review from the publisher. This in no way affected/influenced my rating and review.
To start with, I need to confess that when I agreed to review this book, I was thinking it was a different author. When I got my copy and realized I was wrong, I was unaware of what I was getting into. Am I ever glad I made that mistake! If you haven't read anything by Alice Hoffman, you need to. Now. Preferably with this book. It was that good!
Nightbird is told from Twig's point of view. She lives in the small town of Sidwell, where her family is famous for their apples and an old legend about the Sidwell Witch cursing her family. What the town doesn't know is that the legend is true. New neighbors move in (descendants of the witch), things go missing by way of the Sidwell Monster, and Twig is hard pressed to discover who the monster is and how to break the curse before the town starts a hunt for the monster and discovers the secret her family has hidden for all these years.
Teresa, aka Twig, is a young girl who lives a lonely life. All she knows is that if you let someone close, they discover your secrets-secrets that could devastate her family. Having no friends, she spends a lot of her time walking in the woods, and wandering her families apple orchards. That all changes when she falls out of a tree and meets the Hall family. This starts her on her journey to find out why her family was cursed and how to break it...
I cannot say enough how thoroughly I enjoyed this book. It's not quite the fluff read I expected, but it was even better. I want to rate this a 7 or 8, but I can only give it 5 stars. I recommend this to EVERYONE!!!