Review: The Once and Future Witches, by Alix E. Harrow

[Russ Allbery]

The Once and Future Witches
by Alix E. Harrow

Publisher: Redhook Books
Copyright: October 2020
ISBN:      0-316-42202-9
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     515

  Once upon a time there were three sisters.

  They were born in a forgotten kingdom that smelled of honeysuckle
  and mud, where the Big Sandy ran wide and the sycamores shone white
  as knuckle-bones on the banks. The sisters had no mother and a
  no-good father, but they had each other; it might have been enough.

  But the sisters were banished from their kingdom, broken and
  scattered.

The Once and Future Witches opens with Juniper, the youngest, arriving
in the city of New Salem. The year is 1893, but not in our world, not
quite; Juniper has witch-ways in her pocket and a few words of power.
That's lucky for her because the wanted posters arrived before she did.

Unbeknownst to her or to each other, her sisters, Agnes and Bella, are
already in New Salem. Agnes works in a cotton mill after having her
heart broken one too many times; the mill is safer because you can't
love a cotton mill. Bella is a junior librarian, meek and nervous and
uncertain but still fascinated by witch-tales and magic. It's Bella who
casts the spell, partly by accident, partly out of wild hope, but it
was Juniper arriving in the city who provided the final component that
made it almost work. Not quite, not completely, but briefly the lost
tower of Avalon appears in St. George's Square. And, more importantly,
the three sisters are reunited.

The world of the Eastwood sisters has magic, but the people in charge
of that world aren't happy about it. Magic is a female thing, contrary
to science and, more importantly, God. History has followed a similar
course to our world in part because magic has been ruthlessly
suppressed. Inquisitors are a recent memory and the cemetery has a
witch-yard, where witches are buried unnamed and their ashes sown with
salt. The city of New Salem is called New Salem because Old Salem, that
stronghold of witchcraft, was burned to the ground and left abandoned,
fit only for tourists to gawk at the supposedly haunted ruins. The
women's suffrage movement is very careful to separate itself from any
hint of witchcraft or scandal, making its appeals solely within the
acceptable bounds of the church.

Juniper is the one who starts to up-end all of that in New Salem.
Juniper was never good at doing what she was told.

This is an angry book that feels like something out of another era,
closer in tone to a Sheri S. Tepper or Joanna Russ novel than the way
feminism is handled in recent work. Some of that is the era of the
setting, before women even had the right to vote. But primarily it's
because Harrow, like those earlier works, is entirely uninterested in
making excuses or apologies for male behavior. She takes an
already-heated societal conflict and gives the underdogs magic, which
turns it into a war. There is likely a better direct analogy from the
suffrage movement, but the comparison that came to my mind was if
Martin Luther King, Jr. proved ineffective or had not existed, and
instead Malcolm X or the Black Panthers became the face of the Civil
Rights movement.

It's also an emotionally exhausting book. The protagonists are hurt and
lost and shattered. Their moments of victory are viciously destroyed.
There is torture and a lot of despair. It works thematically; all the
external solutions and mythical saviors fail, but in the process the
sisters build their own strength and their own community and rescue
themselves. But it's hard reading at times if you're emotionally
invested in the characters (and I was very invested). Harrow does try
to balance the losses with triumphs and that becomes more effective and
easier to read in the back half of the book, but I struggled with the
grimness at the start.

One particular problem for me was that the sisters start the book
suspicious and distrustful of each other because of lies and
misunderstandings. This is obvious to the reader, but they don't work
through it until halfway through the book. I can't argue with this as a
piece of characterization — it made sense to me that they would have
reacted to their past the way that they did. But it was still immensely
frustrating to read, since in the meantime awful things were happening
and I wanted them to band together to fight. They also worry over the
moral implications of the fate of their father, whereas I thought the
only problem was that the man couldn't die more than once. There too,
it makes sense given the moral framework the sisters were coerced into,
but it is not my moral framework and it was infuriating to see them
stay trapped in it for so long.

The other thing that I found troubling thematically is that Harrow
personalizes evil. I thought the more interesting moral challenge posed
in this book is a society that systematically abuses women and
suppresses their power, but Harrow gradually supplants that systemic
conflict with a villain who has an identity and a backstory. It
provides a more straightforward and satisfying climax, and she does
avoid the trap of letting triumph over one character solve all the
broader social problems, but it still felt too easy. Worse, the motives
of the villain turn out to be at right angles to the structure of the
social oppression. It's just a tool he's using, and while that's also
believable, it means the transfer of the narrative conflict from the
societal to the personal feels like a shying away from a sharper
political point. Harrow lets the inhabitants of New Salem off too
easily by giving them the excuse of being manipulated by an evil
mastermind.

What I thought Harrow did handle well was race, and it feels rare to be
able to say this about a book written by and about white women. There
are black women in New Salem as well, and they have their own ways and
their own fight. They are suspicious of the Eastwood sisters because
they're worried white women will stir up trouble and then run away and
leave the consequences to fall on black women... and they're right. An
alliance only forms once the white women show willingness to stay for
the hard parts. Black women are essential to the eventual success of
the protagonists, but the opposite is not necessarily true; they have
their own networks, power, and protections, and would have survived no
matter what the Eastwoods did. The book is the Eastwoods' story, so
it's mostly concerned with white society, but I thought Harrow avoided
both making black women too magical or making white women too central.
They instead operate in parallel worlds that can form the occasional
alliance of mutual understanding.

It helps that Cleopatra Quinn is one of the best characters of the
book.

This was hard, emotional reading. It's the sort of book where
everything has a price, even the ending. But I'm very glad I read it.
Each of the three sisters gets their own, very different character arc,
and all three of those arcs are wonderful. Even Agnes, who was the
hardest character for me to like at the start of the book and who I
think has the trickiest story to tell, becomes so much stronger and
more vivid by the end of the book. Sometimes the descriptions are
trying a bit too hard and sometimes the writing is not quite up to the
intended goal, but some of the descriptions are beautiful and
memorable, and Harrow's way of weaving the mythic and the personal
together worked for me.

This is a more ambitious book than The Ten Thousand Doors of January,
and while I think the ambition exceeded Harrow's grasp in a few places
and she took a few thematic short-cuts, most of it works. The
characters felt like living and changing people, which is not easy
given how heavily the story structure leans on maiden, mother, and
crone archetypes. It's an uncompromising and furious book that turns
the anger of 1970s feminist SF onto themes that are very relevant in
2021. You will have to brace yourself for heartbreak and loss, but I
think it's fantasy worth reading. Recommended.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-01-03

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-316-42202-9.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>