★★★★★ The Once and Future Witches, by Alix Harrow
The dangers of oppressing witches
The Once and Future Witches
Alix Harrow
The dangers of oppressing witches
Alix E. Harrow‘s The Once and Future Witches is about a feminist revolution led by witches.
TOaFW is an alternative history fantasy. I confess I didn’t fully understand the world-building. The story takes place in 1893, mostly in the city of New Salem, which I suspect is in the same location as New York in our world. New Salem in 1893 is ruled by men. Women are subjugated in much the way they were in our New York in 1893. They cannot vote or, if married, own property of their own. They are expected to marry and be the helpmeets of their husbands. That should all sound familiar.
Less familiar, though, is that in the past the world was ruled by witches. In that past time women were allowed to be scholars and leader. For instance, one of our heroines says,
“I’ve read the Sisters Grimm a dozen times, every edition I could find. I’ve made a good start on the other folklorists—Charlotte Perrault, Andrea Lang...”
In our world, of course, those folklorists were men. (I was slightly surprised, however, to discover that in TOaFW the Bronte sisters are still the Bronte sisters.)
I never fully grasped when and where the witches of TOaFW ruled, and at what times and places rule was taken over by men. You can read more about the world-building in Harrow’s kindle highlights and notes. In her notes she says, “i made up an entire alternate history of witchcraft and worker’s rights.”. Although I have not fully digested her notes, they don’t appear to lay that history out in any comprehensive way.
The leaders of the revolt in New Salem are the three Eastwood sisters: James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna, who grew up somewhere in what is now the Southern USA -- Harrow‘s home state Kentucky would be my guess. As Johnny (or was it Joanie?) Cash wrote, they “grew up quick and [they] grew up mean”, daughters of a hard father and a mother who died when Juniper was born. They learned some witchcraft from their grandmother.
As the story begins the sisters meet in New Salem. Juniper has just arrived. Agnes and Bella have been there for years, a factory worker and a librarian. The three are drawn together on the spring equinox.
The story is exciting, and very well told. Harrow has become one of my favorite Fantasy writers, and TOaFW doesn’t disappoint. More than anything else, it is about how the three sisters, different from each other, bring their relationship back to life.
I personally felt that this novel could better have been split into two. There is a natural hinge point at 50%, where one part of the story finishes, then another begins. The first novel would have ended on a dreadful cliff-hanger, though, so perhaps that is why Harrow didn’t do it that way.