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

Is it fair to have a literary fiction critique on a fantasy novel?  

Synopsis and background: The Once and Future Witches is written by Alix E. Harrow who has written a few sci-fi and fantasy books in recent years and has received acclaim, for example, winning a Hugo Award (top Fantasy/Sci-Fi Literary award) for “A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies”, a short story from 2019. (https://www.sfadb.com/Alix_E_Harrow)  

The Once and Future Witches is a story about three estranged sisters, Juniper, Agnes, and Belladonna who find themselves reuniting in New Salem in 1893. The back cover of the novel would suggest that the three sisters’ main role is to aid the suffragette movement, however, after the first fourth of novel this is really a story about three sisters searching for a long lost source of witchcraft to fight the main villain of the story.  

Note: Spoilers ahead!

Review: I will preface with a question on what standard we should be using for a fantasy novel. Are the rules for books that are just meant to be “entertaining” much lesser than something we’d consider literary fiction? When reading this novel I couldn’t help but judge it by a literary fiction standard. One - because that is what I perhaps read most and two - the subject matter promised a duality of fantasy and historical fiction that invited a deeper critique than something purely light hearted entertainment.   On this basis, The Once and Future Witches struggled on some key aspects:  

The suffragette plot is abandoned

What happened to this book being about the suffragette movement? We have the three sisters coming together in St. George’s Square and thereafter, June is set on joining the suffragette movement in New Salem. It is pointed out, and accurate, that at this time the movement was all wealthy white women of the time organizing for the right to vote. We then get June organizing a display of magic for the cause that goes wrong, and ultimately leads to her expulsion from the organization. She and her sisters then form their own inclusive organization but this quickly abandons the mission of women’s civic rights and pivots to unlocking a lost source of witchcraft. b.     The historical connection we are promised out of this novel is really abandoned and we just get a montage of the three sisters carrying out public demonstrations of magic across New Salem but we lose what the point of these demonstrations are other than to prove a display of power to the city government? The parallel with the actual development of women’s suffrage in 1890’s America is all but abandoned pretty early on.

Forced diversity in ancillary characters and plots

This was a story where all of the ancillary characters, one off mentions and realizations, and sub-plots felt borne out of a “good liberal” checklist and not genuinely organic to the story. Acknowledge racism and slavery. Check. Have queer/sapphic love element. Check. Mention of trans character. Check. Mention of indigenous peoples. Check. Surface level class struggle/consciousness. Check. Sex workers. Check.

The book ends up using diversity as a sort of set dressing rather than actually investigating those stories. It is merely hinting at complexity without any meaningful exploration. At worst, for example, real historical aspects of race in the story are ultimately just tools to drive the plot of the white main characters. For example, the Daughters of Tituba are present in this book but they are just there in aid of the main characters and never get their own real depth of story and history despite the 500+ page count. We get bits and pieces of this history only when it is convenient for the sister’s, for example, we get pieces of how the underground railroad in New Salem was built but nothing deeper as the sister’s use the system to move undetected.

Mother, Maiden, Crone oversimplified

Juniper, Agnes, and Belladonna are written to align to the Mother, Maiden, Crone archetypes, but the more interesting version of this, which came up at the Soft Cover event, is that these archetypes aren't fixed roles but phases any woman moves through across her lifetime. Harrow had access to that more dynamic reading but chose the static one instead.

Absolutely way too long

Again, at 511 pages – this story could have dug so much deeper on much fewer key aspects and characters with 200+ less pages and maybe this could have been some kind of redemption?

“Men’s” magic versus “women’s magic” There are many times “men’s magic” is something distinct from “women’s magic” when Agnes goes to meet August Lee for the first time and breaks all of the glassware or when August Lee is invited to a Sisters of Avalon meeting to show Agnes and the sister’s the ways of “men’s magic.” In the end, we learn this is a completely arbitrary distinction anyway. This just came across a structural failure more than anything where this could have truly been a distinction cut from the book. We have the whole novel where this is treated as an understood truth but later is undercut but a few lines saying it really isn’t a distinction at all.  

My last thoughts

Returning to whether we should weigh this as lit fic versus fun fantasy, I’d argue that the themes and harder subject matter explored in the novel invites a reader to expect much more than an entertaining fantasy adventure. Harrow is exploring themes and subject matter with deep and dark historical context. We are specifically not set in a mystical land or made up world – we are clearly anchored in a time and subject matter that bridges fantasy with real historical fiction which is why the harder critique is justified and had this been read as just a fantasy genre, I think a lot of valid critique would simply have been overlooked.  

There were some aspects in this book that resonated at the Soft Cover book club event such as the portrayal of motherhood (the fact that once Agnes had her child is still a character front and center), and the spin of childhood fairytales with unique spins and lore built into the novel that sparked discussion how stories are passed down matriarchally.

Where this book could have improved was with either explicitly abandoning the suffragette movement or keeping stronger cross-over with witchcraft and women’s real fight for rights at the time, not being afraid of weaving in more complexity with the “Mother, Maiden, Crone” archetypes, and digging a lot deeper into relevant diversity that would have also bolstered that historical accuracy and depth.

Nonetheless, even books that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend turn out to be great book club books because there is so much to talk about. This was one of those books that ended up being a great point of conversation even if, for me, it was a three-star read at most.