The characters are vivid, addictive and deeply flawed and the story is just fantastic. To employ an extremely predictable metaphor: this book wove a spell around me. If you’re into fantasy as a genre, treat yourself to this one. Shadows pool in doorways and huddle on window ledges, and those in power may not be all they seem. While the sisters are busy gathering their Sisterhood, something in New Salem is very wrong. “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. They’re both…” She gestures in midair again. What if witching wasn’t really gone for good, but could be brought back - and what if they were exactly the right women for the job? What if men’s grasp on power was more tenuous than it looked, predicated on the assumption that women would stay quiet, subdued and separate? What if they stopped asking for women’s rights… and instead just took them? George’s Square, they find each other just as the air begins to crackle, the sky splits open and a tower appears against the sudden starlight…Īs the sisters explore the how and why of their sudden reunion and become entangled in the Women’s Liberation Movement, they find themselves asking some big questions. Women’s suffrage is underway, and against this background, in the heart of New Salem, the Eastwood sisters find themselves brought back together after a long estrangement. There are still women out there with the words, the ways, the will, but these days they cast small spells, cloaked in silence and secrecy.īeatrice Belladonna, Agnes Amaranth and James Juniper Eastwood are three adult sisters who were raised by a brutish bully of a father and a kind, cunning grandmother who taught them more than they realised. New Salem is a city built as a puritanical reboot of the original and styled as the City Without Sin. This is a world from which magic and witchcraft have faded, all but completely. The Once and Future Witches is set in a slightly altered version of our own world, in the late 1800s. It speaks volumes that the first thing I did immediately after turning the last page was to go online and order Harrow’s other novel, The Ten Thousand Days of January. I didn’t know much about this book before I read it it was an impulse buy after I literally judged it by its cover, its title and its impressive Goodreads rating (4.07). This is one of them, and its effect refuses to fade, days after I’ve put it down. Once or twice a year - if I’m lucky - a novel comes along that I feel genuinely devastated to have finished.

Jocelyn Doyle reviews The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E.

The once and future witches book review