Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
Jan. 16th, 2022 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileThis weekend I read the third in the trio of Alternate Historical Witch Books About Terrible Religious Men that I’d wanted to read. The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow I think is as good as The Year of the Witching, making them both a bit better than The Witches of New York, although all three books were enjoyable, particularly if you like the sorts of elements they have in common (which I do). It’s got driven young witches and some dreadful religious zealots and even a mysterious plague.
One thing that makes this one a bit different than the other two is that it has three protagonists. Our main characters are Bella, Agnes, and June, a trio of sisters who, at the time the action takes place, end up fitting neatly into the archetypal roles of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. They all grew up on a farm under the thumb of their dad, who was a batterer and a drunk. For various reasons they all wind up in the city of New Salem (Old Salem, the one that is meant to be the alternate history version of Massachusetts’ now-beloved Witch City, was essentially smote out of existence by Inquisitors in this version of the witch trials). New Salem is going through some political unrest–there is a mysterious fever sweeping the city, and people are also getting all upset and scandalized by the extremely bourgeois and respectable suffragist group that is agitating very politely and entirely legally for the vote, and a factory with the absolutely fictional and original name of the Square Shirtwaist Factory has recently burned down, killing numerous garment workers.
In the middle of all this, the three sisters finding each other again–after having been estranged for seven years, due to a complex sequence of meddling and misunderstandings–kicks off some magical shenanigans, which inevitably causes a panicked backlash among the more uptight sectors of the city, which is most of it. Thus do the sisters decide to actually do the thing they keep getting in trouble for, and form a secret society of witches with the goal of bringing back the lost power of real serious business witching into the world, via the semi-mythical lost tower of Avalon, put together several hundred years ago by the Last Three Witches of the West (known only as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone) and hidden until such a time as it is called back. From here the shenanigans get wilder and more dangerous and start pulling in all other sorts of issues of political repression and social injustice–you’ve got the secret society of witches of color who are sort of dubiously watching the antics of the secret society of mostly-white witches to see how much trouble they’re going to get everyone into, the union men who secretly use bits of “boys’ magic” to rust railroad tracks and tie people’s shoelaces together, the remnants of the city’s Underground Railroad from before the war, immigrants and natives and queer people.
For all that it leans heavily into the “magic as a power fantasy of the oppressed” thing, it’s not a light or fluffy story; it’s a power fantasy for morbid weirdos like me who want to read brutal, violent, high-octane stories where characters have to continually choose between the crushing pain and mortal danger of being attached to other people and the crushing pain and mortal danger of being alone. And it delivers the blood and guts and existential despair in spades, tempered with more wholesome witchy favorites like the Power of Librarianship and the Power of Fashionably Cross-Dressed Lesbians.
I liked the depiction of the tensions between the respectable suffrage association and the more militant witchy types, and I appreciated that it wasn’t portrayed as quite as simple as “the respectable ones are dumb and small-minded”--the strengths and pitfalls of each strategy, as well as reasons why someone would wind up supporting one over the other, are shown pretty sympathetically. The costs of even respectable activism are high; the costs of magic are higher.
I’m not sure there’s anything real deep or insightful for me to say about this book since part of how it winds up at 500 pages is that it definitely makes all its viewpoints very explicit. This is fine as I am in agreement with basically all the viewpoints, and the book doesn’t come off as thinking its own viewpoints are a lot more radical than they are, the way The Witches of New York occasionally did. But it was a great 500 pages to spend a bitterly cold January weekend with.
One thing that makes this one a bit different than the other two is that it has three protagonists. Our main characters are Bella, Agnes, and June, a trio of sisters who, at the time the action takes place, end up fitting neatly into the archetypal roles of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. They all grew up on a farm under the thumb of their dad, who was a batterer and a drunk. For various reasons they all wind up in the city of New Salem (Old Salem, the one that is meant to be the alternate history version of Massachusetts’ now-beloved Witch City, was essentially smote out of existence by Inquisitors in this version of the witch trials). New Salem is going through some political unrest–there is a mysterious fever sweeping the city, and people are also getting all upset and scandalized by the extremely bourgeois and respectable suffragist group that is agitating very politely and entirely legally for the vote, and a factory with the absolutely fictional and original name of the Square Shirtwaist Factory has recently burned down, killing numerous garment workers.
In the middle of all this, the three sisters finding each other again–after having been estranged for seven years, due to a complex sequence of meddling and misunderstandings–kicks off some magical shenanigans, which inevitably causes a panicked backlash among the more uptight sectors of the city, which is most of it. Thus do the sisters decide to actually do the thing they keep getting in trouble for, and form a secret society of witches with the goal of bringing back the lost power of real serious business witching into the world, via the semi-mythical lost tower of Avalon, put together several hundred years ago by the Last Three Witches of the West (known only as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone) and hidden until such a time as it is called back. From here the shenanigans get wilder and more dangerous and start pulling in all other sorts of issues of political repression and social injustice–you’ve got the secret society of witches of color who are sort of dubiously watching the antics of the secret society of mostly-white witches to see how much trouble they’re going to get everyone into, the union men who secretly use bits of “boys’ magic” to rust railroad tracks and tie people’s shoelaces together, the remnants of the city’s Underground Railroad from before the war, immigrants and natives and queer people.
For all that it leans heavily into the “magic as a power fantasy of the oppressed” thing, it’s not a light or fluffy story; it’s a power fantasy for morbid weirdos like me who want to read brutal, violent, high-octane stories where characters have to continually choose between the crushing pain and mortal danger of being attached to other people and the crushing pain and mortal danger of being alone. And it delivers the blood and guts and existential despair in spades, tempered with more wholesome witchy favorites like the Power of Librarianship and the Power of Fashionably Cross-Dressed Lesbians.
I liked the depiction of the tensions between the respectable suffrage association and the more militant witchy types, and I appreciated that it wasn’t portrayed as quite as simple as “the respectable ones are dumb and small-minded”--the strengths and pitfalls of each strategy, as well as reasons why someone would wind up supporting one over the other, are shown pretty sympathetically. The costs of even respectable activism are high; the costs of magic are higher.
I’m not sure there’s anything real deep or insightful for me to say about this book since part of how it winds up at 500 pages is that it definitely makes all its viewpoints very explicit. This is fine as I am in agreement with basically all the viewpoints, and the book doesn’t come off as thinking its own viewpoints are a lot more radical than they are, the way The Witches of New York occasionally did. But it was a great 500 pages to spend a bitterly cold January weekend with.