Our First Read: The Last of the Moon Girls by Barbara Davis

Let me tell you how this book found us, because I love this part.

My friend Misty read it on her own and loved it so much that when she told me about it, she said she would read it again just to do it with us. That is the kind of book recommendation that you don't ignore. When someone who has already finished a book is willing to go back to page one for you, you listen. So I listened, and the moment I started reading about nine generations of gifted women healers on a lavender farm in New England, I knew this was the one. This was going to be our first book.

Here's what you're getting into:

Lizzy Moon spent eight years building a life in New York that looked nothing like the one she came from. Her family has tended Moon Girl Farm in Salem Creek for nine generations, a long line of gifted healers and herbalists who were loved by some and feared by most. Lizzy wanted no part of any of it. She left, built something new, and did a pretty convincing job of pretending the farm and everything it represented wasn't still living somewhere inside her.

Then her grandmother Althea dies.

She goes back to settle the estate and sell the farm, and what she finds waiting for her is an unsolved murder, a town that spent years blaming Althea for it, and a journal Althea left behind called the Book of Remembrances, written specifically to help Lizzy finally step into the gifts she has been running from her entire adult life.

What unfolds is part mystery, part magical realism, part love story, and entirely about what it means to carry a lineage you didn't ask for, to inherit gifts that also make you a target, and to finally stop outrunning the truest version of yourself. It is witchy and warm and human in the best possible way. Reviewers have compared it to Practical Magic and I think that is exactly right.

From an Aletheia lens, this book is rich. We are going to talk about ancestral healing, inherited gifts, the wisdom locked inside family trauma, botanical medicine, forgiveness, and the very specific kind of self-sabotage that looks like playing it safe. There is so much here and I cannot wait to dig into it with you.

Your reading guide is attached to this post. It has a full breakdown of the themes we'll be exploring, the reading schedule with all three dates, and a set of opening journal prompts to sit with before you even start reading. I would genuinely suggest reading the guide first. It will shift the way you come to the book.

We start March 1st. First live is March 25th at 8PM ET.

Go get the book. Then go on over to the community thread and introduce yourself.

With love,

Kristin