Rating: 4 / 5
I really enjoyed Alix E. Harrow’s THE TEN THOUSAND DOORS OF JANUARY, so I was excited to see there was a new book on the horizon and had to pick up THE ONCE AND FUTURE WITCHES. Witchy suffragists? Of course I was intrigued!
THE ONCE AND FUTURE WITCHES is set in 1893 at a time where witches don’t actually exist. Still, the stories of witchcraft are true and witches used to have power before they were taken out in the burnings. The Eastwood sisters, James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna all find themselves in New Salem without knowing that the others are there. Still, the three are drawn together.
The sisters soon find themselves joining the suffragists of New Salem, seeking ways to relearn the powers lost to women in the past and ways in which to use those powers to further the women’s cause. They face the demons of their own past and those seeking to keep them, their gender, and their powers down.
This book is extremely eye catching and the story was fairly quick to draw me in as well. It is fairly slow burn for much of the first half of the book and there were times that I did struggle with it feeling slow. Some of this I think came from the shifting POVs between the sisters and sometimes hearing a bit of repetition from a different perspective.
Even so, I really was hooked to see where the author was taking these characters and their fight. By the end of the later portion of the book, the action really picks up and I found myself struggling to put the book down!
DG Reads 