Charlotte Kersten

“One witch you can laugh at. Three you can burn. But what do you do with a hundred?”

Year published: 2020

Categories: Adult, historical fantasy, retelling

LGBTQIA representation: F/F, perspective character and her love interest, asexual, perspective character, trans woman, side character

Summary: In 1893, there’s no such thing as witches. There used to be, in the wild, dark days before the burnings began, but now witching is nothing but tidy charms and nursery rhymes. If the modern woman wants any measure of power, she must find it at the ballot box.

But when the Eastwood sisters–James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna–join the suffragists of New Salem, they begin to pursue the forgotten words and ways that might turn the women’s movement into the witch’s movement. Stalked by shadows and sickness, hunted by forces who will not suffer a witch to vote-and perhaps not even to live-the sisters will need to delve into the oldest magics, draw new alliances, and heal the bond between them if they want to survive.

There’s no such thing as witches. But there will be.

My Thoughts: To be perfectly and entirely honest with you at the start of this review I’m just going to disclose that I spent large portions of this book tearing up and whispering “Yes! Yes!” to myself. Women finding their power and resilience in the bonds that they share, from sisterhood to friendship to romantic love? Women refusing to tolerate their oppression any longer, refusing to settle for the crumbs that they’ve been given all this time?? Deciding that their suffering is enough???? Fighting like hell through thick and thin to make a change??? Reclaiming the knowledge and freedom and ways of being that have been stripped away from them for generations??????? Yes! Yes!

It’s virtually Charlotte Catnip, and you probably won’t be surprised when I tell you how much I loved this book. I loved the actual magic itself, with the rhymes and odd little items and herbs; the will, the way and the words. I loved the book’s gorgeous, lush atmosphere and the sheer witchiness of it all. I loved how witching survived through devalued forms of traditionally female knowledge: children’s rhymes, sewing, recipes, fairy tales. I loved the sisters’ meeting with the original Maiden, Mother and Crone and the ending itself could not have been more perfect and beautiful, from Juniper’s fate to their quest to spread magic while fighting oppression and re-gathering all the magic that has been lost.

I loved the way that the sisters overcame their father’s abuse, and how their trauma affected each one differently: there was Juniper’s rage and recklessness, Bella’s self-effacement, anxiety and fear and Agnes’s withdrawal, avoidance and belief that connection gets you hurt. The way that his abuse divided them from each other and turned them against each other also demonstrates the way that female subjugation often does the same thing on a societal level. I loved seeing them rebuild their relationships and come to trust each other once again.

I loved Harrow’s understanding of early feminism and the limits of its respectability politics – ultimately the Eastwood sisters decide that you won’t get too far in getting what you want in following the rules that have been set for you by your oppressor, and I’m right there with them. The other side of those respectability politics also means the exclusion of women who by their very identity are deemed disrespectable, like women of color and sex workers, and Harrow is very clear about that too.

The book is determined to make it clear that there is no one monolith of Women’s Magic – rather, different cultures have all different kinds of methods and traditions. It’s also important to note that the book speaks meaningfully to the role of magic in fighting slavery and the double burden that black women bear by virtue of their identity, while the same is also true of queer women.

I will say that for all the things I loved about this book there are others that I didn’t love so much. For one thing, I still can’t make up my mind about Harrow’s prose. Sometimes I think it’s lovely and sometimes I feel like it feels too manufactured and deliberately precious to be truly skillful, if that makes sense. At other times it just felt a bit melodramatic.

I’d also say that each sister’s characterization is very clear and precise, to the point where I felt like it worked to the detriment of organic characterization. Each sister has a very clear lesson to learn: Bella to be brave, Agnes to let others in and Juniper to live for something other than hate. I feel almost as though I got to know Harrow’s lesson for each sister more than I got to know each sister as a complex individual. This is definitely less true of Juniper than the other two- she was funny and gritty when she wasn’t absolutely derangedly reckless- but I’m afraid that I found Agnes and Bella to be rather boring.

I would have loved to see more moments of them learning to love and trust each other again because I truly cherished those scenes when they happened. I also think Harrow chose kind of bizarre moments for a couple of the huge emotional beats in their relationship because one happens while Juniper is bleeding out and the other happens while Agnes is in the middle of labor.

I also complained about the romance in The Ten Thousand Doors of January and, by God, I’ll do it again here. Unfortunately I’m starting to think that I just don’t jive too well with the way that Harrow writes romance. I liked Quinn as an individual character and August was…uh, there… but I never really understood why romances developed between them and Agnes and Bella or cared about those subplots. On another note, while I loved the idea of the little fairy tale snippets, the actual little stories themselves were fairly disappointing and at the ending of each one I was left thinking “Oh, that’s it?”

Finally, I do have some quibbles about Harrow’s representation/politics. I question the decision to include a trans woman character who exists in the story exclusively to get kidnapped and tormented by her horrible, abusive family and then have a tearful coming out scene with the sisters. Things get a little bit silly and simplistic with Agnes’s love interest and how he Learns That Women Can Do Things Just As Good As Men Can, and there are a few general statements about men that feel more like lazy, viral misandrist tweets than anything else. Finally, I think my Goodreads friend Emma has some interesting things to say about how the book’s treatment of race, while not offensive, does feel a little awkward in places.