There was a lot going on in this novel with many threads of the story requiring introduction, build, and resolution. The sisters are confronted with their own family drama, the political unrest of the suffragette movement, and a villain who could have walked straight out of the pages of a fairy tale.
This book is set against the backdrop of the suffragette movement with plot elements that echo the witch hunts of the late 1600s. So begins The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Where the tower stood the sisters find each other, while the townsfolk around them dissolve into panic. I’m looking forward to her next book.In 1893, three estranged sisters feel themselves pulled by magic to the middle of New Salem’s town square where a tower suddenly appears, surrounded by thick forest, with a murder of crows circling overhead. I’m glad they complained though so I could find this author and story. I saw this more as a typical fantasy Good vs Evil story than an overtly political one so I don’t know what that original commenter was talking about. The story was self-aware enough though to have the Black women call them on it. It veered away from that some but it is still there. It was feeling a bit like the Black women have been doing the work and now the white folks are going to swoop in and take the credit. They are helped by an order of Black witches who have been honing their magic for a long time. The three sisters are white women who are bumbling through and not really knowing what they are doing. I was a bit afraid that this book was going to get a little too White Savior at points. The book includes a lot of gender-bent fairy tales where the women and girls are the powerful ones. I loved the fact that most of the witch knowledge has been passed down in fairy tales. That’s not really witching though, is it? When a group of estranged sisters accidentally trigger the reappearance of a mysterious black tower, women start to be more forthcoming about what they can really do.
Most every woman knows a little spell or two passed down from their mothers and grandmothers. The story is set in an alternate Massachusetts where witches are real but shunned. That style tends to bore me when I am reading.
The writing is very lyrical and descriptive. I listened to this on audio and I think that was the best choice for me. She said she didn’t know what people expected from a book about lesbian suffragette witches. She said that one of the weirdest complaints that she gets about this book is that it was too political. I heard about this book from a retweet of a tweet from the author.
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