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I’m Hayley. I live on the Goldy (Australia), teach awesomely funny high school kids, have two hilarious (and mental) toddlers, am engaged to a motorbike-loving Viking, and sometimes I write. I write for no other reason but to express myself. And if you’re here reading my writing, that’s my very cool bonus.
I blog about asylum seekers, gay rights, tattooed professionals, robot dancing, baby poo, and so on … you know, the juicy stuff. I’m sometimes serious, but mostly not. I write poems, short stories, and novels (three to date) which has surpassed any goal I ever had. Go team. Aaaaaaand that’s about it. No need to waffle, unless it’s Belgian. Or Chinese.
PEACE
HMC
Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite
The Water Seer is a young adult urban fantasy written by HMC. Modesta Castro, who goes by the name of Mouse, is worried about her upcoming internship as a primary school teacher. While she knows she’s good at what she does and that the children love her, she still harbors some insecurity about her abilities. For a little while, however, she’s able to release her tensions and lose herself in her beloved ocean. Mouse is a longboard surfer; she loves everything about surfing: waiting for the wave, merging into it and then going with the flow as the board moves along with the water. As soon as she’s back on land, however, her worries resume. When she gets home, her mom is making gazpacho, and Mouse goes into her room to work yet again on her lesson plans for the grade one practicum. Then she feels a presence behind he and she hopes her visitor will be her deceased Aunt Catriona, the Cat to her Mouse, but it’s a stranger - a lovely and calm-seeming woman suddenly morphs into something dark, cold and sinister that clutches at her and obscenely licks her face. Mouse, like her Aunt Cat, has visions, and while one helped her save a young woman’s life, they occur with no warning and some, like this one, are quite terrifying.
HMC’s young adult urban/paranormal fantasy, The Water Seer, is everything one looks for in a book of this genre. Mouse is a water seer who has been receiving visits since she was a child. Fortunately, her mom and Aunt Cat understood what was happening to her since Aunt Cat also had visions. Readers get to know Mouse, however, after Cat has already passed away, but we still get to meet her as she helps her niece cope with a destructive, powerful and ancient water witch. I enjoyed being privy to the three women’s rituals and learning a bit about the herb and stone lore they use for protection against their foe, and I found the omnipresence of the beach and the ocean utterly delightful. HMC’s plot is clever, exciting and thoroughly unpredictable, and her characters are authentic and well worth getting to know. I enjoyed it so much that I’m hoping the author will consider a sequel. The Water Seer is most highly recommended.
