Do you ever read a book and think to yourself: I wanted to like this so much more than I actually did? That sums up my feelings about The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow.
The Once and Future Witches is a tale of three sisters, during the late 1800s, who find themselves in the middle of a women’s suffrage movement in the town of New Salem. To help strengthen their cause and win the battle against the oppressive local government, the sisters turn to their roots in witchcraft and, along with the women they recruited to their cause, (under the pretense that there’s a bit of witchcraft everywhere) take their stand. As you might imagine, this leads to dealing with witch hunts and a wonderful dose of fighting the patriarchy. But I’ll stop there before things get overly spoilery.
On the surface, this book is everything I should love in a story. There’s sisterhood in a witchy, Practical Magic type way. There’s fighting the patriarchy and women standing up for women’s rights. There’s magic and folklore and characters who are paving their own ways. There’s a few romance storylines going on. There’s even an interesting commentary on discrimination (on both the basis of race and sexuality) that I think really highlights the importance of intersectionality when discussing feminism.
These things are all fantastic things to explore in literature and I am excited that there were so many explored in this piece. The problem with this feels pretty obvious though — there’s a lot going on. At some points, it feels like an “everything but the kitchen sink” type situation and I think this is a big part of where I struggled with this book.
The Once and Future Witches is not a short book. I didn’t read a physical copy, but according to Amazon, the paperback clocks in at 544 pages, so it’s not a George RR Martin / Brandon Sanderson length door stopper of a tome, but it’s not short either. But despite it’s length, I’m not sure the story was actually long enough to explore all of the topics it brought to the table, and in rushing or cutting short some of them, it felt like it did them a bit of a disservice. (At the same time, I don’t think it needed to be any longer, but I’ll get to pacing in a minute.)
An example of underdeveloped plots that stands out is the storyline surrounding Cleopatra “Cleo” Quinn. As a character, she is a BIPOC woman with strong ties to her witch roots and she is in a romantic relationship with one of the sisters. She brings a lot to the table. Alongside being the representation for the LGBTQ community in a time when such a lifestyle was not accepted by the general public, she also gives the story an insight as to the racism that people of color dealt with in that time period and during suffrage movements. Honestly, a lot of her backstory is really fascinating and I would — without hesitation — read an entire novel about the life of Cleo.
It’s obvious from the way that this particular storyline plays out that Harrow has done her research and has some extensive knowledge on the topic. It’s interesting, it’s well represented, and it was mentioned in light of the importance that those topics had historically at that time. But, with so much else going on in the story, these mentions feel superficial. I understand that as a secondary storyline, these wouldn’t get as much attention as the main one, but Cleo was on the cusp of being a main character and I felt like her story deserved more time than it actually got. Instead, it was mentioned with such brevity that it didn’t feel as significant as it should have.
There are some other instances of this as well throughout (though none feel quite as big as the Cleo plotline) and it made it hard to dive into any of the plotlines in a way that I think they might have been intended and that they deserved. I think this was made even harder by the fact that — and I fully acknowledge that this might just be a personal thing — but I didn’t feel like I connected really with any of the main characters. For me, all the sister’s fell a bit flat and felt one-dimensional. (And I do think that there are some links between this feeling and the fact that there were just too many storylines going on to expand on their backstories.)
Because of all these, I hate to admit that there was a point about 2/3rds of the way through the book where I was struggling to maintain the interest I had going into it. There was so much going on, but nothing really intriguing, the main storyline felt like it was getting lost in the shuffle of it all, and there weren’t really any likeable or relatable main characters to follow through the the plot.
And, on top of it all — or perhaps also because of it — the story moves slowly. I knew going into it, based on tags it had on Goodreads and Storygraph, that this was a slow paced novel, but I didn’t expect it to be as slow as it was. It felt downright glacial at points. There’s a lot of exposition, which I feel like tends to be par for the course with historical fiction, but combined with everything else going on, I found some parts to be really sloggy. I think that tightening up the amount of things going on and making the story a bit shorter might have made it more effective.
Overall, though, I can understand why so many people like this book. It has a great premise. It brings a lot of interesting and intriguing topics to the surface. If you find yourself relating to one of the main characters, this book might be a really interesting ride from that perspective as well. As a novel, it absolutely has its merits (and from a prose standpoint, it’s obvious that Harrow is a talented writer), but this one wasn’t a hit for me.
If you read this far, thanks for checking out my review! I know it was a bit of a novel in itself, but I feel like that tends to happen when the nuance of conflicting feelings is involved. Happy Reading!
