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Glow Witch
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Glow Witch on a London rooftop beneath a full moon, her black cat beside her, two children watching from a lit window.

Book One · Catherine Moon

Glow Witchand the Secrets of the Sky

Every chapter, something impossible happens in the sky. Ella is nine, and absolutely certain she knows who did it. Ella is wrong. And Glow Witch is standing right next to it, every single time.

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Look up

From the world of Glow Witch

Something is wrong
with the sky.

Nineteen times over one year — and Ella takes every single one of them personally.

The mystery underneath

She is there
every single time.

The Moon. The rainbow. The sea. The wind. The castle. The stars. Ella spends almost a year asking what Glow Witch has taken.

Eventually, she asks a much better question.

Follow the clues
Ella at her bedroom window at night, hands against the glass, the witch standing on the roof opposite. Watch

The story

Nineteen mysteries.
One secret.

Ella Marlowe is nine and almost never wrong — mostly because she has moved on to being certain about something else before anybody can prove otherwise. Her older brother Elliott likes to check.

Their mother reads old ice for a living, which is why this family is always somewhere else: Spain, Norway, a loch in Scotland, Lapland in the dark, Sydney at Christmas. And wherever they go, something in the sky goes wrong, and there is a woman in a tall hat standing near it.

“Not everything you cannot see is gone.”
Glow Witch walking an avenue of autumn chestnuts in daylight, handing Ella a single brown leaf. Watch

Science says

Magic makes you look.
Science tells you why.

Moon phases, rainbows, tides, wind, clouds, meteors, fog, lightning, autumn, hail, black ice, auroras, the polar night, stars and eclipses. Every mystery ends with a real explanation a child can read themselves.

Then TRY THIS turns it into an experiment using a torch, a ball, an orange or a hailstone — things already in the house.

Three taps. Same rhythm. Every time.

Science says — chapter one

  • The Moon does not make its own light. The light we see on it comes from the Sun.
  • The Sun lights up one half of the Moon, always. Even tonight.
  • As the Moon travels around the Earth we see different amounts of that bright half. Those are the phases.
  • It goes through all of them in about 29 and a half days, then starts again.
  • When the Moon looks “gone,” the lit half is facing away from us. It is still there. All of it.

Try this tonight

You will need: a torch, a ball, a dark room.

Sit still and hold the ball at arm's length. Have someone shine the torch at you from across the room, and turn slowly in a circle with the ball held out in front of you.

Watch the shape of the light on the ball change as you turn.

You have just made every phase of the Moon in your bedroom.

Book one · Nineteen chapters

Nineteen accusations.
Nineteen true answers.

Glow Witch — crow-black hair with blue and green in it, emerald eyes, a spiderweb veil on her hat and a staff burning violet. Meet her

The woman on the roof

She never once raises her voice.

Which is exactly why she is frightening. Crow-black hair that throws the moonlight back blue and green and violet. Emerald eyes, emerald nails, one emerald burning at her throat from the inside. A tall hat veiled in spider's web, with one small spider living on it, riding along as though it had been invited.

She has had several names and will not confirm any of them. And in four hundred years, Ella is the first person to march up to her and demand the Moon back.

Smiles properly twice in the entire book

The strange little family

Everyone she keeps is named after a piece of the sky.

A child who has been paying attention works the pattern out one line before Ella does.

For the grown-up reading this aloud

What your child learns, in order.

All of it real, all of it checked, and all of it load-bearing by chapter nineteen.

    “How do you know?”

    Elliott's question, asked in every single chapter. The most useful sentence a child can own.

    “Being wrong is the interesting part.”

    Ella is wrong eighteen times and is never once humiliated for it. That is deliberate.

    “Not everything you cannot see is gone.”

    Said in chapter one, meant properly in chapter sixteen, and paid in full in chapter nineteen.

    The series

    One fact each.
    The same three taps at the end of every one.

    Never opens on a title. Opens on the wrong sky. The fact is the reward for staying.

    Watch them all on YouTube · @GlowWitch →

    Asteria — a grey stone house at the end of a misty valley, peacocks on the lawn, a crow in the fountain and the witch walking up the drive with a lantern.

    Asteria

    Everything that lives here was left somewhere by somebody.

    Grey stone, turrets at both ends, far too many chimneys, and a glasshouse with a hole in the roof she has been meaning to mend since before this country had a queen. There is a fountain in the drive, built for horses. The crow has taken it over, and will fight anything that comes near it, including her.

    Book one, free

    Come and look up with us.

    Email me and I'll send you the whole of Glow Witch and the Secrets of the Sky — all nineteen chapters, with the science and the experiments inside them. Book two arrives when she has finished with it.

    Ask me for the book Watch on YouTube

    glowwitchstories@gmail.com

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