First impression review: The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow
This book had me hooked from the very first page:
There’s no such thing as witches, but there used to be. It used to be the air was so thick with magic you could taste it on your tongue like ash. Witches lurked in every tangled wood… But then came the plague and the purges. The dragons were slain and the witches were burned and the night belonged to men with torches and crosses…There’s still no such thing as witches. But there will be.
Expertly blending the feel of a fairytale with an unexpectedly realistic depiction of actual struggles against oppressive systems – featuring suffragettes, trade unionists, and post-reconstruction-era black reporters - it has everything I love. The story is set in an alternate 19th century where witchcraft is real but suppressed. We follow the Eastwood sisters, who inherited some of the ways and words from their grandmother, but whose relationship has been shattered by trauma. To rebuild magic, they need not only to heal that bond but to make new allies. It proves to be a long but very exciting road.
A reader who is familiar with witch-lore will pretty quickly realize the archetypes the Eastwood sisters embody. The book itself confirms this a gorgeous passage:
Juniper always loved the maiden-stories best. Maidens are supposed to be sweet, soft creatures who braid daisy-crowns and turn themselves into laurel trees rather than suffer the loss of their innocence, but the Maiden is none of these things. She’s the fierce one, the feral one, the witch who lives free in the wild woods. She’s the siren and the selkie, the virgin and the valkyrie; Artemis and Athena…
Agnes Amaranth…never liked mother-stories much. They make her think of her own mother and wish she’d been someone else…Mothers are supposed to be weak, weepy creatures, women who give birth to their children and drift peacefully into death, but the Mother is none of those things. She’s the brave one, the ruthless one, the witch who traded the birthing-chamber for the battlefield, the kitchen for the knife. She’s bloody Boadicea and heartless Hera, the mother who became a monster…
Beatrice Belladonna…never believed in crone-stories, even as a girl. She determined long ago that the Crone was an amalgamation of myths and fables, an expression of collective fear rather than an actual old woman. Old women are supposed to be doting and addled, absent-minded grandmothers who spoil their sons and keep soup boiling on the stove-top, but the Crone is none of those things. She’s the canny one, the knowing one, the too-wise witch who knows the words to every curse and the ingredients for every poison. She is Baba Yaga and Black Anna; she is the wicked fairy who hands out curses rather than christening gifts.
Or, at least, those are the stories that get told by those who, on some level, suspect that behind every evil witch is a woman wronged!
The Eastwoods aren’t just archetypes, though. They each feel like real people. Juniper is the youngest and angriest, the natural revolutionary; she believes her sisters left her alone with their abusive father. Agnes and Beatrice blame each other for spilling each other’s secrets and getting them both sent away. Agnes has tried to deal with this by keeping her head down at her factory work, drawing a circle around her heart, and not letting anyone else in. But, as the story goes on, she learns that while caring about others can get you hurt, love and solidarity offer not only protection but power1. Beatrice, the character I most identified with, is a bespectacled librarian who is trying to live quietly, but whose rebellion is already seeping out in the form of her research into the witch tales that she can’t leave alone. But even non-magical words can shape the world...
That brings me to the love interests, both of whom I adore - and if you’ve been reading this blog, you know I’m picky about romance! Cleopatra Quinn is probably modeled on the anti-lynching reporter and co-founder of the NAACP Ida B. Wells. Miss Quinn is brave, with a saucy glint in her eye, but she isn’t reckless, which makes her a good match for Beatrice, who needs to learn to believe in her own courage. Quinn is also secretly a member of the Daughters of Tituba – an organization of black witches named after one of the first people persecuted in the Salem witch trials. This provides a good opportunity for the book to explore the tensions and difficulty of building trust between white and black women, given how often the latter have found themselves rejected or thrown under the bus by the former! August Lee is a born troublemaker deeply involved in the labor movement. Agnes meets him when she goes to find out how the Pullman car strikers in Chicago were able to rust train-tracks to dust and earns his respect by throwing so much will into a “man’s” spell that she shatters every glass in the bar. He earns hers by not caring that she’s unmarried and pregnant and – more importantly - by offering his steady support to the sisters’ cause2.
1. As ‘Solidarity Forever’; has it: ‘Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?/ But the union makes us strong!’
2. One of my friends complains about the inability of authors to give a badass woman a male love interest without ruining her character. Here you go, Amy! August isn’t weak, but he recognizes that, in this fight, it is Agnes who has the necessary knowledge and (eventually) angry mama-bear energy. Agnes appreciates that: “More men should try offering fealty instead of roses.”
The whole concept of “men’s magic” versus “women’s magic” leads into another favorite aspect of this book: While it focuses on women’s struggles, it isn’t gender-essentialist. Magic doesn’t care what chromosomes you have, how you identify yourself, or what family line you come from – though, initially, many people believe that it does. There are all different kinds of “words and ways” that those of different genders and cultures have concocted, but they are all part of the same thing. Another aspect that was heart-wrenching but wonderful is the number of reversals our heroines face. Often in stories we get a relatively straight-line path to victory; the heroes spend most of the story trying to achieve one goal (eg. get magic ring to Mount Doom and throw it in) and, once that goal is achieved, they win and the story is over, save some mopping up. This story, on the other hand, more closely mirrors the way social change happens in the real world: Goal A is achieved, resulting in a backlash, goal B is achieved, kicking off a more vicious backlash, goal C fails in an apparent total loss, and finally our heroes rise from the ashes but with scars and work still to do. There is a “big bad” who has deeper connections to the history of witchcraft than I was expecting, but beating that enemy isn’t the end.
Since I’m a natural nit-picker, I could gripe about “why are so many names and events the same in this alternate timeline?”… but I won’t, because the fairytale tone made that feel fun. I laughed out loud at the suggestion that women’s pockets are inadequately sized so that we can’t hide serpents’ teeth and other witchy implements, and enjoyed the gender-swapped author names that were dropped: Alexandra Pope, the Sisters Grimm, etc. There are alternate versions of folktales, too: Aunt Nancy (Anansi) stealing reading-skills for her granddaughter, the maiden who pricked her finger and put the whole castle to sleep for a hundred years so that she could rule. The broader cast of characters help to flesh out this world that is ours-but-not. Genteel Grace Wiggin sides with the patriarchy and the cult of domesticated womanhood. A male ally shelters our heroines in a hidden room that used to be a stop on the underground railway. “The last witch-doctor of the Congo” is displayed in a fair exhibit like so many other examples of colonized people, while a Lakota witch plans to go back out west to help spare her own tribe the same fate. And all the women at the first meeting of the Sisters of Avalon have utterly real reasons for joining:
“My brother gets fifty cents a day at the mill. I get a quarter for the same damn work.” “The courts took my son,” hisses someone else. “Said he belonged to his father, by law.” Miss Pearl offers, “They arrested two of my girls on immorality, and not a one of their customers.” The end of her sentence is lost in the sudden flood of complaints: bank loans they can’t receive and schools they can’t attend; husbands they can’t divorce and votes they can’t take and positions they can’t hold. Juniper holds up a hand. “You’re here because you want more for yourselves, better for your daughters. Because it’s easy to ignore a woman…But a hell of a lot harder to ignore a witch.”
Overall recommendation: If you like witches and stories about the fight for justice, real or fictional…go read this right now!
