Book Review: The Once and Future Witches
Look, if you make a book about witches, chances are, I’m going to want to read it. Those are the rules. And considering how much I enjoyed The Ten Thousand Doors of January, I wasn’t going to let Alix Harrow’s next novel pass by anyway. So here we are.
Witching is a thing of the past, present now only in small rhymes and tiny charms. When the Eastwood sisters become involved with the suffragette movement in New Salem, though, they begin to discover the old ways and share them. And as witching returns, it brings with it an enemy that does not want women to have power of any kind. In order to win their rights, the Eastwood sisters will need to heal their broken relationships and bring back magic properly.
I moved directly from The Midnight Bargain to The Once and Future Witches, which turned out to be a strong thematic choice. They share a lot of DNA — both deeply concerned with women’s rights and with how women navigate male-dominated spaces to make a space of their own. I also read this during the week of the 2020 election, which added another emotional dimension entirely to the reading.
There are a lot of great things to say about this book. The prose is next-level good, a trademark of Harrow’s work. You could quote passages from this thing literally all day (it’s a long book), without running out of good quotes.
Even more than that, it’s an exquisite portrayal of relationships in general and sisterhood in particular. I have two sisters myself, and we have always fought and disagreed in ways large and small. So the struggles of Beatrice Belladonna, Agnes Amaranth, and James Juniper, the ways they hurt each other large and small, felt particularly resonant for me. Each of the sisters is unique and well-defined in her own way: Beatrice, the quiet, nerdy one full of stories and knowledge; Agnes, the practical and dependable caretaker; James, the reckless and passionate young firebrand. Seeing them begin to reconcile with each other and forge stronger bonds tugged at my heartstrings the whole time, and the ending…woof.
And while, as I mentioned above, this is a woman’s novel about carving space for women in a male-dominated space, it is not a book that hates men. Good men exist. August, in particular, struck me as a beautiful character, capable of giving Agnes the love she deserves and forging a relationship with her as a partner.
It’s also a novel that touches on more than just the themes of women’s rights and suffrage. It ties those things to the civil rights movement, in the form of New Salem’s Black community and several characters of color who are integral to both the movement and the story.
But all that said, this book has one glaring flaw: it is slow as molasses in the first half. And that’s even more of a problem because it’s a big book - “the first half” is roughly 250 pages, almost a novel in its own right. There is so much setup, so much introspection, that the story gets bogged down. The back half is much better, as the external conflict really sets in and there is less room for long digressions; in places it even becomes a nail-biter. But that requires you to get through the first half, and not everyone will.
Part of the pacing problem is also due to the way the villain is presented; he’s heavily present in the back half, but mostly encountered from a distance in the front half. The book gets much better when he moves into direct confrontation with the main characters, adding more direct danger to the story. He’s also a fairly well-constructed villain, with a well-developed backstory, and it’s a shame we don’t get more of that earlier; he seems so one-dimensional at the beginning only to discover that he’s really not.
Before I wrap up, I have a few quick notes about the world. This is definitely an alternate universe Earth, where witching and magic are very real and very powerful, and Harrow does a good job of making the divergences clear while still staying close to our reality. That said, it is narrowly focused on New Salem, with only hints peeking through of other areas of the world. It works, because of how introspective the story can be, but don’t go into this expecting an expansive look at what an Earth with magic looks like.
I went back and forth a lot on the rating for this, because I love it so much for the themes and it resonated so deeply with me. But that pacing problem is hard to look past. If slow books don’t bother you, then you’ll find this one very rewarding.
Grade: 4/5 stars
Memorable Quote:
“Beatrice hesitates. She thinks about the fates of girls who go astray in all the stories, the hot iron shoes and glass coffins and witches’ ovens. (She thinks about St. Hale’s, a prison built especially for straying girls.)
But then Beatrice looks at Agnes still waiting for her, half scowling, and thinks about what else awaits those gone-astray girls: the daring escapes and wild dances, the midnight trysts and starlit spells, a whole world’s worth of disreputable delights.”
