Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E Harrow

I had to look it up afterwards, this book came out in 2021 and was up for several awards, winning the British Fantasy Award. I feel it had an enormous amount going on in it. It was a complicated book that either could have been split into several shorter stories, or a book that could have been fleshed out into a thousand or so page tome. I get the impression that the author would be happy to do either as it seems these characters are very loved.

It is not to say I didn’t enjoy this book but I sometimes wondered what this book wanted to be. It’s dense, it’s a heavy book to contend with but at no point is there not a lot of forward motion. It propels the reader on, character driven, though there were things I admittedly would have liked to stop and examine or characters I would have liked to have spent more time with rather than switching as much as we did between the sisters. I think it’s a mark of how well written and crafted the book is that is really shouldn’t be read quickly. It’s something that ought to be sat with.

The plot follows three sisters in a maiden-mother-crone dynamic who have fallen out due to various revealed traumas but are drawn back together by a series of magical events tantamount to magical terrorism –events are blamed on witches in an effort to undermine the suffragist and women’s rights movements during which the story takes place. The setting is a fusion of rewritten history with magical context, very in the vein of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell but without Susanna Clark’s historian sensibility; instead lessons are infused throughout the story rather than explained or footnoted in. It’s presented as though you’re already meant to know it, which I do like this style of being thrown into the kiddie pool. I absolutely loved the prose, I loved the way which the author sticks fingers into nooks and crannies to pull out grubs of information, but I found myself at times distracted by the switching between characters. This, honestly, shows an effective writer. I wanted to stay with a character I was reading about, not move to whatever sister provided the next plot point right away, but it also made it feel like it was written with a television-season sensibility. You could see the commercial breaks. I am no less guilty of that in my own writing, but it is something that’s had me stop and consider if I want to continue doing that in my own manuscripts.