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"There's no such thing as witches. But there will be".
I can't remember how I heard about this book, so that probably means Twitter.
Set in 1893 in a parallel USA where witches used to be real but were hunted out of existence, magic is still everywhere but has no real power.
Three estranged sisters from Appalachia find themselves in New Salem and drawn together when one of them reads aloud some handwritten marginalia in an old book of nursery rhymes.
The three meet again at a women's suffrage march - one is a librarian, one a mill worker, and the youngest has just come to the city, on the run from the law. It soon becomes apparent that the cause of votes for women and fairer labour conditions are intrinsically tangled up with returning witchcraft to the world, and the recovery of the Lost Way of Avalon, with the forces of conservatism and tradition ferociously opposed to both (and some of the feminists being opposed to witchcraft, wanting to be "respectable").
I loved everything about this book. The prose is gorgeous - the characters and setting feel very real. Harrow takes annoying popular tropes around magic and turns them on their head. Bloodlines? Irrelevant. (To the disappointment of the youngest Eastwood sister, who wanted to be special). Men's vs Women's magic? A false dichotomy. Words of power are encoded in fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Queer characters (including a trans witch) abound. It's full of (intersectional) feminist rage. But most of all it's a gripping, suspenseful story where I really wanted to know what would happen next, and I really cared about the characters.
I can't remember how I heard about this book, so that probably means Twitter.
Set in 1893 in a parallel USA where witches used to be real but were hunted out of existence, magic is still everywhere but has no real power.
Three estranged sisters from Appalachia find themselves in New Salem and drawn together when one of them reads aloud some handwritten marginalia in an old book of nursery rhymes.
The three meet again at a women's suffrage march - one is a librarian, one a mill worker, and the youngest has just come to the city, on the run from the law. It soon becomes apparent that the cause of votes for women and fairer labour conditions are intrinsically tangled up with returning witchcraft to the world, and the recovery of the Lost Way of Avalon, with the forces of conservatism and tradition ferociously opposed to both (and some of the feminists being opposed to witchcraft, wanting to be "respectable").
I loved everything about this book. The prose is gorgeous - the characters and setting feel very real. Harrow takes annoying popular tropes around magic and turns them on their head. Bloodlines? Irrelevant. (To the disappointment of the youngest Eastwood sister, who wanted to be special). Men's vs Women's magic? A false dichotomy. Words of power are encoded in fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Queer characters (including a trans witch) abound. It's full of (intersectional) feminist rage. But most of all it's a gripping, suspenseful story where I really wanted to know what would happen next, and I really cared about the characters.
