My mother has always been drawn to New Age spiritualism—at least for as long as I’ve known her. Which means that over the course of my life, I’ve not only had my palms read, but my fortune told, and my astrological chart presented to me with the kind of solemnity usually reserved for legal documents. 

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When a boyfriend I was sure I loved dumped me, my mother took me to a tarot card reader who, with grave authority, assured me he was “not the one.” When my first novel failed to sell, she suggested a psychic. This one communicated with “those on the other side” and told me I’d one day attend a book launch for a book I had written, baby on my hip.

I’ve been a skeptic for most of my life. The sort who demands evidence, data, double-blind studies. But when I struggled to get pregnant in 2020, I found myself—well, let’s just say more open to the mystical. Alongside my appointment at the fertility clinic, I adopted a holistic diet, started a supplement regimen, booked acupuncture. And then, like any anxious millennial with a Wi-Fi connection and a credit card, I bought candles. Tall white tapers. Also, an offering bowl. Also, a spell book.

On the eve of my first egg retrieval, I performed my first spell.

Each time I performed a spell, I felt a tiny flicker of control.

I knelt on the floor of my office (door firmly shut, lest my husband walk in and find me crouched over a candle whispering to herbs) and used a kitchen knife—I hadn’t yet learned what a boline was—to carve sigils into the wax. I ground the herbs like I’d read I was supposed to. I lit the candles. And then, using the same small voice I’d once used to pray as a child, I spoke the incantation.

Over the year that followed—through every round of hormones, every ultrasound, ever call from the clinic—I returned to those candles again and again. Each time I performed a spell, I felt a tiny flicker of control. A ritual to offset the waiting. A gesture toward hope.

I also wrote a book.

My novel, Marrow, follows a woman named Oona who returns—disguised and under false pretenses—to the remote island where she grew up and where her estranged mother runs a coven that claims it can help women conceive. I wrote it between embryo transfers and OB appointments. By the time I typed “The End,” I was holding my first daughter. When the book sold (at auction!), I was pregnant with my second.

It was a lovely, symmetrical ending to that chapter in my life. So, I put the spell books away. Packed up the candles. Pulled out the bassinet and the burp cloths. I assumed I was done with magic. That part of the story had closed.

I’ve talked them off cliffs and out of rage-quitting. I thought I knew what to expect.

After all, I’ve been a literary agent for fifteen years. I’ve walked dozens of authors through publication. When my author Parini Shroff worried about abandoning the project that was to be her first novel to write what became The Bandit Queens, I reassured her, promising her that whatever she felt most drawn to would inevitably be the better book. When Beth Wetmore entered her fourth year of revisions for Valentine and began to doubt herself and her process, I encouraged her to remain faithful to her vision. Time and time again I’ve held writers’ hands through negative reviews, late-stage edits, and cover trauma. I’ve talked them off cliffs and out of rage-quitting. I thought I knew what to expect.

And then I got my first Goodreads review.

It wasn’t even that bad. Mildly critical. A three-star review with a few adjectives I didn’t love. Still, it lodged somewhere in my chest, like a pebble in a shoe. Annoying. Impossible to ignore.

Despite having told my clients—repeatedly, emphatically—not to read reviews on Goodreads or NetGalley or Amazon, I found myself refreshing every platform obsessively. Checking, rechecking. Reading the same reviews so often I memorized them. 

I tried to follow my own advice for coping with pre-pub jitters. I whispered the mantra I’d offered to others: No book is for everyone. I repeated it like a prayer. It didn’t help.

Then, one Saturday in early August—six weeks from launch—I decided to reorganize the playroom closet. The baby things were ready to be retired, my youngest now almost eighteen months. I pulled down a dusty heap of muslin swaddles and found, buried beneath them, my old spell books.

The girls were napping. My husband was at the gym. The house was quiet. So, I thought: why not. For nostalgia’s sake.

I lit the candles. Filled the offering bowl. Spoke to the guides.

Now, if asked, I’d still say I’m a skeptic. I probably always will be. In the days since that spell, something shifted. “Resignation” isn’t quite the world, it’s too heavy. Maybe “surrender.” Or maybe just peace. I stopped checking the review sites. Turned off the Google alerts. Stopped measuring myself against metrics I can’t control.

But I’ll be at my book launch with my youngest daughter on my hip—just like the psychic predicted—and holding my oldest by the hand. Surrounded by the two children I once begged the universe to send me. And if that same universe wants to give Marrow a little boost?

Well. I do still have the candles. 

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Marrow by Samantha Browning Shea is available from G.P. Putnam’s Sons.