Tuesday, October 6, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Once and Future Witches by Alix E Harrow


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on October 13, 2020 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.


The Once and Future Witches is the second full length novel by Alix E Harrow, a SF/F writer who has kind of stormed onto the scene the last few years.  Harrow won a Hugo for a short story two years ago, and this past year was nominated twice, including for best novel for her novel The Thousand Doors of January.  I enjoyed The Thousand Doors of January quite a lot (My review is here) although I've found less enjoyment in Harrow's award nominated short fiction work, which I've kind of felt relied upon a stilted narrative that I couldn't quite get into.

And well, The Once and Future Witches reminds me more Harrow's short fiction than The Thousand Doors, to its detriment.  It's a feminist novel about a trio of sisters leading women to take power for themselves in an alternate late 19th century Massachusetts and the characters are in general likable and enjoyable.  But the narrative again feels kind of stilted and hard to flow for me, several characters do not have consistent character arcs, and the book's attempt to deal with the racial issues of the women's suffrage movement fall very flat.  The ending is fine and fitting, but the end result is a novel that just feels like it had so much potential to say something and provide a wonderful story with a strong message, but instead just doesn't.


----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
Magic exists, and men may use it here and there in society, even if they don't quite talk about it.  But Women aren't supposed to use magic - as witches are supposed to be a thing of the past, even at the very moment when some women fight in the city of New Salem for Women's Suffrage.

But for the three Eastwood sisters, Agnes, Bella, and Juniper, witchery and witching tales were part of their birthright thanks to their grandma, Mama Mags, who taught them its ways.  But the girls' abusive father drove them each away, and they haven't seen each other in years.

That all changes one day in New Salem, when a spell brings the three of them together once again, with a vision of a lost tower - a tower of witching power from the past.  The vision will tie the three together on a journey to bring back the witching ways to the women of New Salem, women tired of being abused and mistreated by the men in the city, & and want to make a stand.  But the puritan forces of the city, led by an aspiring politician, will not stand by as the three sisters rediscover the witching ways, and will do everything they can to ensure the costs of defiance are all too high.....
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Once and Future Witches is a story that is told from the perspectives of its three protagonists, Agnes, Bella, and Juniper, with occasional interludes at times where one character tells another an old witching tale - which is generally an adaptation of a classic fairy tale.  At the start of each chapter is a witching spell, which is also generally an adaptation of a classic nursery rhyme or children's song, which often ties into the plot of that particular chapter.  But other than those peculiarities, the book swaps often between following one of the three sisters, as they struggle to understand each other, themselves, and what they want to be as they find themselves drawn more and more into learning and teaching the witching ways.

The book takes place in an alternate Massachusetts, in a city called New Salem, at the end of the 19th century during the movement for women's suffrage.  Yet while the Amazon summary highlights the women's suffrage movement, and Juniper gets her start at the beginning by being introduced to the movement, the plot quickly leaves it behind in favor of emphasizing the use of magic as the story's focus for women's power.  After all, in this setting, men having magic such as the ability to rust metal and destroy parts of factories as part of their labor movement is considered an open but acceptable secret, so why shouldn't women have that same power in the fight for rights?  And the setting, unlike our own US, is one in which "witchhunts" are of actual witches, who men and the other forces of patriarchy hunt because they symbolize women gaining actual power - not just over their representatives, but over every part of their lives.

And well, we see this symbolism in the storylines of each of the the three main characters, all of whom grew up with a grandmother trying to empower them and an abusive father trying to put them down and struggle to undo the damage caused by his actions.  So you have Bella, who has become a wise librarian who secretly has feelings for women instead of men, who wants to research the history of magic but needs a pushes to truly put that research into practice.  You have Agnes, the practical one who once wanted to help but soon learned that helping could have consequences, and thus fears what will happen if she dives back into the magic.  And you have Juniper, the wild and angry one who is most outspoken about the needs for the empowerment of women, but who doesn't always think about the long term consequences of her actions, and how things for others might not fit the world that she thinks really is.  The trio's storylines involve them struggling against how the patriarchy has warped them in the past, as the patriarchy does its best to keep them down further in the present as well.

Alas, while the general idea works, and the general plot works, and the magic system is really well done, there's just so much of this book that doesn't quite work.  On a character level, the book honestly feels like it can't decide which storyline is Agnes' and which is Bella's, with the book starting seemingly at the idea that Agnes is the strong practical one looking out for everyone and Bella the coward and then...flipflopping that to make Agnes the coward and Bella the one willing to do the research to try and help Juniper out as Juniper gets more into trouble as the plot goes on (it has Bella keep calling herself a coward mind you, even as it flips the two).  It's like halfway through the drafting the author decided to switch their arcs, and it is kind of jarring.

That's not the only idea that honestly feels like it was shifted during the drafting - for example a major character introduced early as a potential love interest for Bella is a Black woman, Cleo, who seems at first to be part of either a black woman's suffrage movement or more likely a secret organization fighting underground for the rights of Black Witches - something exceedingly difficult in a time when the suffragettes frowned upon the very idea of including Black women in their cause.  Early parts of the book involve Cleo making it clear to Bella (and the others to a lesser extent) that they don't understand the prejudice that Black Women face is exceedingly worse, and how the Black women aren't just going to agree to bind themselves to these White Women just finding out now what they've already known from their own traditions.  It's a really interesting conflict based upon the real world.....and the book essentially punts on it having any effect on the plot, with Cleo basically turning entirely to Bella's side midway through as her unshakable love interest who becomes the only person who will keep pushing Bella forward, despite Cleo's mother giving her occasional snide comments about it.  The result is that Cleo just feels utterly wasted - as if the author wanted to make it clear she understood the difficulties that would be faced by Black women in this time, and then felt she'd done the work after doing the bare minimum.

Add to that the writing style which honestly just doesn't really work for me - I call it stilted but I'm not really sure how to best describe it - and well an ending that fits the story but just doesn't really seem to say anything?  It just essentially makes this a book that's fine and enjoyable to some extent, but not one that leaves anything lasting behind, which is a shame because the setup shows so much promise.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)