The Once and Future Witches

I picked this up expecting a cozy story about witches and suffrage and got something with teeth. Alix E. Harrow's second novel, published by Redhook in 2020, is set in an 1893 America where magic is real, illegal, and mostly the property of women who have learned to hide it in nursery rhymes. It is a big book, 528 pages in the hardcover, and it is angry in a way that sneaks up on you. The first hundred pages feel like a fairy tale. By the end, people are burning.

Three sisters and a tower

The Eastwood sisters have not spoken in seven years. Agnes Amaranth, the middle sister, works at a cotton mill in New Salem and is pregnant by a man who wants to marry her. Beatrice Belladonna, the eldest, is a librarian at Salem College, quietly brilliant and quietly miserable. James Juniper, the youngest, arrives in town at seventeen with a limp, a dead father, and a murder charge hanging over her. She is also the one who still believes the old stories.

The sisters were raised by their grandmother, Mama Mags, who taught them that magic has three parts: the will, the words, and the way. The will is desire. The words are the spell. The way is the shape you give it, a gesture, an herb, a fire. When Mama Mags died, the sisters scattered. Agnes stayed and tried to be respectable. Bella buried herself in books. Juniper ran.

Then Bella finds a strange verse in a first edition of Grimm and whispers it in St. George's Square. A black tower rises out of the ground. The sisters are reunited whether they like it or not, and the town notices.

That tower is the novel's central image. It is a reminder that the witches were not wiped out, only pushed underground. Their magic survives in the rhymes children chant while skipping rope, in the stories mothers tell to keep daughters close, in the parts of women's lives that men have decided are not important. Harrow is not subtle about this. She wants you to see the nursery rhyme as a survival strategy.

The sisters' childhood is the wound under the story. Their father was violent. Juniper killed him, or believes she did, and the novel takes its time revealing what actually happened in the barn the night the sisters scattered. Agnes left to build a respectable life and has been punishing herself for it ever since. Bella left to become a scholar and has been hiding in other people's books. None of them escaped cleanly. The magic they inherited from Mama Mags is tied to that house, that fire, and that father, which is why the reunion is so volatile. They are not just estranged sisters. They are three different attempts to survive the same man.

Harrow structures the book around the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone, and she assigns each sister a role that fits and chafes at once. Juniper is the Maiden, reckless and furious. Agnes is the Mother, pregnant and practical. Bella is the Crone, though she is too young for the label, because she is the one who reads and remembers. The roles are a spell and a cage, and the novel's best emotional work comes from the sisters refusing to stay inside them.

The will, the words, and the way

The magic system is one of the book's great pleasures. Spells are built from ordinary domestic things: a pinch of salt, a braided cord, a rhyme with the right rhythm. The sisters each have a different relationship to it. Agnes is practical and precise. Bella is scholarly and hungry. Juniper is reckless and full of raw power. When they work together, they are stronger than any of them alone, which is the thesis of the novel in one sentence.

Harrow uses the history of American witchcraft and the history of the women's suffrage movement as the same story. New Salem is a city where women are expected to be grateful for small freedoms and where the men who run things are terrified of women gathering. The suffrage meetings are held in church basements and parlors. The witches meet in the same rooms. The novel keeps blurring the line between political organizing and spellcasting, and that blur is the point.

The villain is Gideon Hill, a charming politician who wants to be mayor and then something more. He is not a cartoon. He is patient, well dressed, and very good at making women feel that their anger is the problem. He also has a secret that the sisters uncover slowly. The city's founding story, the one about the Last Three witches who were burned at Avalon, is not the whole truth. Hill was there. He has been there for a very long time.

Building a movement

The middle of the novel is about coalition. Juniper joins the suffragists and immediately gets them thrown out of their own meeting for insisting that witchcraft and the vote are the same fight. The sisters form the Sisters of Avalon, a small coven that grows into something larger. They meet Jennie Lind, a labor organizer, and Cleopatra Quinn, a Black journalist whose family history goes back to Tituba.

Cleo is one of the best characters in the book. She is smart, guarded, and funny, and her relationship with Bella is the emotional center of the second half. Harrow does not treat race as a side note. Cleo's magic comes from a different tradition, and the white suffragists are not sure they want her in the room. The novel is honest about the ways the suffrage movement excluded Black women, even as it imagines a version of the movement that could be better.

The set pieces in this stretch are wonderful. The sisters turn a statue of St. George into a bronze pig. They grow a golden apple tree in a graveyard. They fill a factory with vines. Each act is a piece of political theater and a piece of magic, and the city reacts like a city would, with gossip, panic, and violence. Harrow has a gift for the image that is both beautiful and a little ridiculous, and she knows it.

The prose is lush. Too lush for some readers, I suspect. Harrow loves a sentence that curls, and she loves a list of three things, and she returns to certain phrases (the will, the words, the way) often enough that they become a refrain. I liked the music of it. I also skimmed a few paragraphs in the middle when the sisters were explaining their feelings to each other again.

Avalon and the truth about Hill

The last third is where the fairy tale turns into a thriller. The sisters perform a ritual in three locations at once. Bella, as the Crone, works in Old Salem. Agnes, as the Mother, works in New Salem. Juniper, as the Maiden, works in the Deeps, the underground prison where the city keeps its inconvenient women. They use crone's tears, mother's milk, and maiden's blood. The tower of Avalon returns, and the sisters finally learn what happened to the witches who were burned.

The answer is worse than they expected. Gideon Hill is George of Hyll, a witch who betrayed his own people and has been hopping from body to body for centuries. He did not destroy the witches because he hated magic. He destroyed them because he wanted to own it. He has been stealing women's power, and their wills, for generations. The novel's politics become very literal here. The villain is not just a man who wants to be mayor. He is the system that keeps taking women's labor and calling it his own.

Hill wins the election anyway. He institutes witch trials. He kidnaps Agnes's daughter, Eve, who is born in the middle of the chaos and who is the most powerful thing in the book. The sisters have to decide what they are willing to burn to get her back. Agnes confronts Hill in City Hall and stabs at his eye. Her hawk familiar, Pan, claws his face. It is the first proof that he can be hurt.

The climax is a public execution that becomes a riot. The sisters are tied to a scaffold. August Lee, Agnes's friend and the woman she loves, uses a water spell to keep the fire from touching them. The crowd joins in. Women in pointed hats put the guards to sleep, rust the chains, and free the prisoners. Bella's light spell spreads through the crowd. Hill's stolen shadows go back to their owners, and his withered true body is exposed. Grace Wiggin, the daughter he adopted and used, strangles him with her sash.

The fire and the baby

The final sacrifice is Juniper's. Hill's soul tries to jump into Eve, and Juniper catches it. She binds it to herself, climbs back into the pyre, and speaks the unbinding spell. Her crow, Corvus, finishes the words as she dies. It is a gorgeous, terrible scene, and it earns the book's length. The sisters have spent the whole novel trying to protect each other, and Juniper's choice is the one act of protection that none of them can argue with.

Then Harrow does something I did not expect. She brings Juniper back. Bella uses a rose-petal ring from Cleo, and the witches chant a version of "Ring around the roses" that turns the old plague rhyme into a resurrection spell. Juniper returns, changed. She does not need food or sleep. She is tied to Avalon now. The epilogue, set a year later, scatters the sisters: Agnes and August raising Eve in Chicago, Bella and Cleo in New Orleans, Juniper back at the family farm teaching magic to women who need it.

I have seen readers complain that the resurrection undercuts the sacrifice. I understand the complaint. I also think Harrow knows what she is doing. The book is called The Once and Future Witches. It is a story about women who refuse to stay dead, who pass their magic down, who come back in rhymes and stories and daughters. Juniper's return is not a cheat. It is the thesis.

What the book is angry about

The anger is the best thing in it. Harrow is furious about the way women's knowledge has been dismissed as superstition, about the way labor is extracted and credit stolen, about the way the suffrage movement sold out Black women, about the way men like Hill can smile while taking everything. The fantasy lets her make those arguments without a lecture. When a woman whispers a nursery rhyme and a tower rises, the metaphor is not hidden. It is the whole point.

The novel is also about sisters, in the literal and the political sense. The Eastwood sisters spend years hurting each other because they were taught to compete for scarce love. The coven they build is an alternative to that scarcity. It says that power is not a pie. It can be shared. That is a simple idea, and the book makes it feel hard won.

The limits

It is too long. The middle sags. The villain's exposition goes on. Some of the sisterly arguments repeat the same beat: one sister withholds something, another feels betrayed, they reconcile, then do it again. Harrow's prose is beautiful, but it can also be relentless, and a few chapters could lose ten pages each without hurting the story.

The history is more feeling than fact. Real suffragists were not witches, and the book knows that, but it flattens some of the differences between the fight for the vote and the fight for magic. Readers who want a rigorous historical novel will be frustrated. Readers who want a myth about why the fight mattered will be satisfied.

Should you read it

If you liked The Ten Thousand Doors of January, this is bigger and angrier and more uneven. If you like historical fantasy with a strong voice and a clear politics, it is one of the best examples of the form. If you want something fast and light, it is not that. It is a doorstop with a heart.

I would read it for the sisters, for Cleo and Bella, for the image of a black tower growing in a town square, and for the ending, which is one of the few fantasy climaxes I have read that actually feels like a crowd. It is a book about who gets to tell the story, and it is not shy about grabbing the pen. I closed it wanting to read a history of the suffrage movement, which is probably the highest compliment I can pay a fantasy novel.