Let’s Go on a Pond-cation, Black History Month Edition: A Tour through the Eerie Village of Bethel from The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson

Let’s Go On a Pond-cation is a guest feature at The Quiet Pond that celebrates and highlights worldbuilding in stories! In our Pond-cation posts, the Pond friends and authors team up to take all of us on a virtual vacation through the real life places in books or the places that inspired fictional places and worldbuilding. Find out more information about this guest feature here.

Our Friend is Here: Black History Month Edition is a month-long event at The Quiet Pond during the month of February, where Black authors are invited to celebrate being Black and Black books! Find the introduction post for Black History Month here.

We’re going on a trip! It’s always such a joy to be able to do more creative features here on the Pond, and I’m delighted to be hosting Alexis Henderson, author of The Year of the Witching, here today to guide us through the spooky village of Bethel, where her story is set. The Year of the Witching was one of my absolute favorite books of 2020—and if you love witches, dark fantasy horror featuring religious allegories, and unsettling stories with a mounting sense of dread, you absolutely do not want to miss this book. Now, let’s go see what Sprout is up to…

Top Reads of the Year: Sprout’s Ten Favourite Reads of 2020 (plus a few sequels)

It’s been a year of years, friends.

Whatever 2020 looked like for you, and wherever you find yourself at the wee dawn of this new year, I hope you’ve found some warmth and comfort in the little places in your life. It’s been a terrible few months all around, so I hope (and Sprout hopes!) that you’ve been treating yourself gently too.

Amidst a lot of personal turbulence in the past year (between online college and some bad mental health days), fiction was a constant that I returned to over and over again whenever I needed grounding—the stories I experienced were both escape portals and anchors in my day-to-day life. It is perhaps no surprise that I ended up reading double the amount of books I set out to read in my 2020 Goodreads goal; the achievement feels a little bittersweet, but it’s a victory nonetheless! It brings me a lot of joy today to be rounding up all of my favorite books that I read this strange, strange year, and I hope they bring you some solace too.