Through the Eastwood sisters, Harrow explores themes of maiden, mother, crone, as she constructs a wild, fantastic world that somehow blends a fictional nineteenth-century backdrop (with mill girls, early labor unions, and suffragettes) with elements of well-known fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Quickly, the reader discovers that James Juniper, Agnes Amaranth, and Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood are bound for great adventures as magic seems to connect them to one another as surely as it spills forth from them. From its opening line, magic runs through The Once and Future Witches, as three wayward sisters, whom life has separated for seven years, find themselves drawn to the same city square on the same day. Harrow creates a late nineteenth-century fictional world of Crow County (think southern Appalachia) and New Salem (one hundred miles south of the ruins of old Salem) for her reader in The Once and Future Witches. Among the notable witch-themed novels out this year is Alix E Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (2020). From Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies to Alice Hoffman’s Magic Lessons, this year has witnessed the publication of many a witch tale.
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