They are witches without the craft of witches, wayward women in a world that “binds and bridles” wayward women. They are estranged from one another, broken, impotent, and invisible, all having suffered at the brutal hands of an abusive father. I read Harrow’s anecdotal aside as apt allegory, given that Nobody is who the three Eastwood sisters are at the start of Harrow’s novel, a witch-tale about witch-tales, and the author’s first novel following the Hugo-award-winning portal fantasy The Ten Thousand Doors of January.īella, Agnes, and Juniper Eastwood are nobodies. When the man was asked later who’d cursed him so that she could be found, he exclaimed, Nobody! It was Nobody! The woman was in fact a witch, because as Harrow says, “behind every witch is a woman wronged.” The witch cursed the man, who, in dismay, asked who she was. Harrow tells us in The Once and Future Witches, a man wronged a woman.

Three you can burn.Once upon a time, Alix E. Sprinkled with humor and romance, it’s a great book to add to the to-be-read pile. When a diverse group of people comes together who are fed up with the ways of the world and refuse to be silent, they are a force to be reckoned with. Besides folklore, history, and magic, this book includes real-world issues which are still being tackled today the willpower of women, the love of family and friends, and realizing one’s potential. The excerpts of folklore at the beginning of each chapter foreshadow what will happen, which was a nice treat as a reader.

While the middle lagged a bit, the anticipated showdown at the end was gratifying, and still managed to throw a couple of curveballs. Despite years of frayed familial ties due to misunderstandings and anger, now Juniper, Agnes, and Beatrice have no choice but to rely on each other as they are pulled into an intricate web including suffragists, bringing magic back to the world of women, and a wily enemy that follows their every move, determined they don’t succeed.

Beatrice buries her past life and her thoughts in books at her job as a librarian, and Juniper is left to fend for herself for a lonely few years with her good-for-nothing father before she flees.Ĭertainly, neither of the sisters expect to be standing staring at each other after an unexpected witching event in the town square of New Salem-one which plops all of them straight into the crosshairs of magic and mayhem. For Agnes, that means putting her head down and keeping everyone at arm’s length for fear of a spark of connection. Their bond has been irrevocably broken and now each sister must do what is necessary to trudge on. James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood thought they would never be parted.

The once and future witches romance