“Witching and women’s rights. Suffrage and spells. They’re both …” She gestures in midair again. “They’re both a kind of power, aren’t they? The kind we aren’t allowed to have.” The kind I want, says the hungry shine of her eyes. [loc. 800]
An alternate 1893, more than a century after Old Salem burned to the ground, and the witches disappeared. The Eastwood sisters -- Beatrice Belladonna, Agnes Amaranth and James Juniper -- have each made their way to the city of New Salem, each harbouring long-nursed grudges against her siblings. (These grudges, founded on betrayal and abandonment and spite, are misdirected.) When they meet again after seven years' separation, all become involved with the nascent womens' suffrage movement. Though there's an undercurrent of something darker, something less polite, beneath the meetings and the banners. The Eastwood sisters might be witches, and they might be looking to reawaken their heritage.
It's easy, at first, to see the three as the triptych of maiden-mother-crone: fierce Juniper, sensible strong Agnes, shy bookish Bella. But “Every woman is usually at least one of those. Sometimes all three and a few others besides” [loc. 6523], and each of the sisters ends up uncovering, or rediscovering, or reawakening another aspect of herself.
There is a lot of plot in this novel, and the variable pacing and multiple narrators are sometimes confusing. I'd have liked to see more of the secondary characters -- particularly Miss Cleopatra Quinn, who is awesome, and whose history and heritage could have done with more exploration. But there is so very much to enjoy and to empathise with. Juniper, who sets everything rolling (or roiling), is certainly my favourite of the three sisters ('"You girls have done very well.” Juniper wants to write the word girls on a ribbon and strangle him with it.' [loc. 3715]), and her ferocity and fury feel painfully relevant.
Bella, the eldest, who's so fascinated with the old stories and songs, also fascinates. This is a world where the Sisters Grimm collected 'Children and Household Witch-Tales', where translator Miss Alexandra Pope inserted a few lines about moly into the Odyssey, where an Italian witch walked through nine circles of Hell. And it is a world where the most important things are hidden in "Women’s clothes, children’s toys, songs … Places a man would never look". [loc. 3936] The subtly-refashioned fairy tales that appear as interludes in The Once and Future Witches also reveal a culture where women had power, and men feared it.
There is joyful rage here, and suffering, and revolution and love and diversity. There is also, uncomfortably, a tailored plague that preys on the poor and the brown; some casual period-typical racism from white characters; and some subplots that are oddly paced or insufficiently explored. The Once and Future Witches is not perfect: but as a whole, and in so many of Harrow's lyrical urgent sentences, it lives and it sings.
[UK Publication: 13OCT20]
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