To catch a witch

 At the last Readercon—which was, sadly, not last year, but the one before—I largely gravitated toward buying little pretty witchy books, including Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York. It seemed a vaguely atmospheric choice to read through another long, rainy summer week, so that’s what I did.

 

The story follows one Beatrice Dunn, a seventeen-year-old orphan who was raised by her eminently sensible aunt in upstate New York, as she goes into Manhattan to work as an assistant in an occult shop. This being New York in 1880, there’s quite a lot going on—spiritualism is in vogue, exciting new scientific technologies are reshaping fields from medicine to communications, suffragists are agitating for the right to vote, and of course a load of religious zealots are skulking about being quite horrified of all of this. In short, it is a perfect time for Beatrice to develop the ability to see ghosts. 

 

Under the tutelage of the two women who run the occult shop--Eleanor St. Clair, a quiet, botanically inclined lesbian, and Adelaide Thom, a former street urchin and sideshow seer with one eye missing from an acid attack--Beatrice begins training as a witch, and gets involved in ghost-seeing for the benefit of a few other people in her employers’ circle, including a woman who owns the ghost-riddled Fifth Avenue Hotel and a doctor and “alienist” who lost his arm in the war. Everything’s going well except for the church lady trying to get Anthony Comstock to shut the shop down, and some minor nasty business with one of Eleanor’s exes, and the fact that someone in town is kidnapping girls who are witches or who he thinks are witches and murdering them. Because this is a tidy little story that does basically what you expect it to, the someone is a fire-and-brimstone priest who is being tempted by demons to get real arrogant about his ability to tell who else is being tempted by demons, and takes famed Puritan douchebag Cotton Mather as his hero and role model (except he’s not as smart and considerably murdery-er). 

 

The book doesn’t really delve too deeply into the politics of the time except as set dressing, which… is basically fine, that’s just the type of book it is. Overall it’s pretty enjoyable, a tasty little addition to the canon of feminist-witchy fiction--some fun historical tidbits, a gloss of girl power, good triumphing over evil, ghoulies and ghosties and wee wicked beasties (i.e. cute animal companions), and some convenient light romance to tie the end up all neatly (though fortunately not involving Beatrice).