What Fiction are you reading this week, June 25, 2023?

[MontanaMama]

3. I just finished Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow. I fell in love with this book after the first sentence…”Once upon a time there were three sisters.” I can’t do this novel justice here so I’ll link to a description below that does…I could not put this big book down. That’s saying a lot for me…but was mesmerized by it and by the end was dragging my feet to finish it because I didn’t want it to end. It’s that good. I don’t really enjoy historical novels and here I am recommending this! It’ll probably be banned in Florida…witching, suffragettes, racial injustice, lesbianism. Lordy it’s enough to make Ron DeSantis run skerd.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924561383/the-once-and-future-witches-will-have-you-spellbound

Witches were powerful, once. Now, witching is illegal. At a suffragist rally in New Salem, 1893, Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood unwittingly performs a partial spell which reveals a magical tower in the sky — and brings together estranged sisters. Beatrice is the eldest, a librarian, folklorist, and lesbian; then there's Agnes Amaranth, stoic, pregnant, a street-savvy factory girl; finally, James Juniper, youngest, wildest, a country-girl and murderess. Their shared history is a tangle of hurt and betrayal, but they loved each other, once. The New Salem Women's Association kicks Juniper out when she agitates for witching rights alongside the vote, so she starts The Sisters of Avalon; a new movement, bold, aggressive, open to all women. Agnes recruits others, while Beatrice works on a shared grimoire. Her goal — the ultimate goal of The Sisters of Avalon — is to find the rest of the tower-spell and reclaim magic believed lost. Meanwhile, plague and panic are on the rise. Fringe-party politician Gideon Hill blames witchcraft. People are listening, and there's something wrong with the shadows of New Salem ...

So much of The Once and Future Witches is about what could happen when women talk to each other, sharing knowledge, building community. Harrow knows community is power; that it can be found and built. Forging connections takes work and it's often as challenging to accept support as it is to give it. The Once and Future Witches has much to say about isolation and the shapes a society takes when it is scornful of parts of itself. It also explores what is owed family, the past and future.