Charlotte Kersten

“Good people don’t bow their heads and bite their tongues while other good people suffer. Good people are not complicit.”

So What’s It About?

The small country of Bethel lives by the Prophet’s law: submission, purity, piety and conformity are the rule, and Immanuelle’s mere existence is proof of her mother’s sin. She tries to live a pious life but the ominous Darkwood calls with its promises of another world. The witches that once plagued Bethel are said to reside there still, waiting for a chance to take their revenge on the Prophet that doomed them. When Immanuelle wanders in the Darkwood she discovers secrets that never should have been uncovered, and what follows is plague of plagues that will doom Bethel unless she can stop it. But as secrets come unraveled Immanuelle must decide: does Bethel deserve to be saved?

What I Thought

This is a 2.5 star rating at best. I feel terrible about that because I feel terrible about disliking any book that isn’t outright malicious in content but…here we are, gang. I did not really think this was very good. Positives first, though! I did love all the witchiness involved, as I do with any book where witchiness is involved. The ominous Darkwood was oozing with atmosphere and the four original witches (Lilith, Delilah, Jael and Mercy) were suitably creepy every time they showed up. Each of the plagues was horrible in its own way and all of the story’s atmosphere and imagery were oppressive and eerie.

I also love the message that Henderson was going for here. A Puritan-inspired fantasy is a fresh idea and I appreciate her argument that women’s sacrifices in the name of duty and purity are at the heart of Puritan Christianity. She makes it clear that patriarchy is often masked by benevolence, its ugly hypocrisy hidden as men like the Prophet pretend holy authority but use their power to abuse women. It was also infuriatingly accurate that the Prophet frantically tried to hid this reality of his horrible actions by turning himself into a martyr unfairly persecuted malevolent women. (Witchunt, anyone?)

Bethel’s society is one with a massive sexual double standard where women are characterized as inherently sinful and scapegoated for every problem, especially if they don’t or can’t comply to rigid gendered expectations of purity and duty. There is an exploration of intersectionality in Immanuelle’s experience as a biracial woman in a racist and sexist society; I really enjoyed the sections of the story that focused on the people of color living in the Outskirts a lot.

So this is all great, absolutely! The problem is that the more I think about how Henderson tried to make these points and how often they got muddied by her own text I’m left feeling that this book could have been executed much more successfully. One of my biggest problems is that I’m always going to doubt the feminist merits of a book that largely revolves around a luekwarm protagonist’s romance with a dude who makes most of the plot happen to the vast detriment of her relationships with other women in the story. I’ll break it down for you:

Lukewarm protagonist. I never really got a solid sense of Immanuelle as a character, to be honest. A huge part of this is that I didn’t buy her transformation from a conformist good girl to a witchy rebel. She moves from passive to reactive to active with not much internal growth to match it, so it was not a compellingly or convincingly written psychological process to me. I think it would have been much for effective for her to start out the story already rebellious and chafing under Bethel’s constraints.

There are a few other points where she was characterized unsatisfyingly – at one point towards the end the narration said that Immanuelle’s family had “always been her weakness” and I was like…”Okay, since when?” I don’t feel that Henderson did the work necessary to make me believe in Immanuelle’s emotions towards her family at all and that statement more or less came out of nowhere to me (as did a certain family member’s death).

Dude who makes most of the plot happen in this feminist novel. LOTS of people complained about Ezra on my Goodreads updates for this book, and I think I’m going to disappoint some of you by saying that there’s nothing especially awful about him as a character personality-wise because, as with most characters in this book, I never got a really strong sense of his personality. I mostly just take issue with his role in the story instead.

I mean, he spends a significant amount of the story mansplaining oppression to Immanuelle despite the fact that he’s the second-most elite white man in this racist and sexist society and she’s a biracial woman. She relies on him so much – Ezra gets her the books she needs, Ezra gets her the warrant and wagon she needs, etc. And even more than that she spends a large part of this feminist tale of coming to terms with society’s unfairness and malecentriticy thinking about Ezra and how she feels about him. That doesn’t seem quite right to me.

Paucity of relationships with other women in the story. I liked her cool cross-dressing lesbian grandma and how Immanuelle came to terms with her mother’s decisions, as well as the ultimate resolution to the conflict with her utra-Puritan mother figure whose name I’ve forgotten, but other than these aspects of the story there wasn’t very much emphasis on female relationships here. Immanuelle’s “best friend” just popped up every once and a while to talk about marrying the Prophet and getting sexually abused by him and then dying in childbirth. This is a thing I’ve noticed in a few other books recently, with The Poppy War being one prominent example – authors want to address Violence Against Women but they don’t want do the work of developing deep female relationships or characters (outside of the protagonist in some cases) so there’s just a random girl in the story whose entire purpose is to get raped and then talk about that and that alone, usually before dying tragically and then rarely being thought of again. Not really a fan of that, actually.

Imagine this: there’s a secret coven of female rebels in Bethel who find strength and sisterhood together and come to terms with their experiences of sexism and abuse while planning to change their society. They take refuge in each other’s friendship and love and reclaim the tales and magics of powerful witches past to overthrow the Prophet together.

And imagine this: Immanuelle and best friend are actually in love and it’s through their continued relationship after she is married to the Prophet that we come to learn even more about the truth of Bethel’s injustices. Immanuelle secretly comes to visit her and she’s able to play a similar role in the story as Ezra, providing Immanuelle access to the Prophet’s secret materials and the items that she needs over the course of the story. Also she doesn’t die and she doesn’t just exist to talk about being raped and she and Immanuelle live happily ever after!!!!!!

CAN YOU IMAGINE? WOULDN’T YOU READ THE HELL OUT OF THAT? But no. No. Instead the story revolved around boring mansplainer Ezra and Immanuelle’s inexplicable feelings for him. It’s tragic, honestly, when I think about how incredibly mediocre it ended up being when it could have been so powerful instead.

There are a few other points where I just feel like Henderson sabotaged her own great message. For one thing I kept expecting it to be revealed that the original four witches weren’t actually evil; instead, the religion’s founder simply scapegoated the four powerful magical women and drove them from the society so that he could instate his own patriarchal law instead. But… no, the witches actually ended up being evil and a huge part of the book’s finale involved defeating them. It seems jarring to try to convey this message about the Church being built on lies and oppression but nevertheless have them be entirely right about these witches at the cornerstone of its mythology being iredeemably evil. Like, it is absolutely implied that they were warped into being that way because of how they were treated but even with that in mind it just felt so tonally discordant for them to be killed in an epic battle right before the Prophet was defeated.

Immanuelle was also really inconsistent in how she viewed Bethel as a society. Sometimes she seemed to believe that Bethel was corrupt to the core – the land and its religion were fundamentally rooted in oppression, lies and hatred and there was no way of redeeming that. But then a couple of chapters later the book’s happy ended was simply that everything was going to be fine because Ezra took over as the Prophet. Hmmm. The point of the story up until then wasn’t that the previous Prophet was simply one bad man who abused his power – the argument seemed to be that Bethel’s power structure was inherently wrong and abusive as a whole. That ending seemed to spit in the face of everything else the book was trying to say. I simply cannot believe that exchanging one bad man in power for a good man in power is enough to justify a happy ending, even if that good man’s plan is to start reforming his society.