What a quirky book, but one that I found lovely in its own way. The focus is on the friendship between four old women who have, over time, created a home together in a eccentric manor where they can be themselves. There’s a lot of messaging around identity and found family which was well done, coupled with some more heavy handed messaging around, like, MRAs or anti-female energy which I felt was a bit 2D.
The plot seems a lot more confusing from the blurb than it actually is. Five very old witches live in the Moonshyne Manor, and are pretty behind on the mortgage due to a series of unfortunate mishaps with their distillery business. Their land is about to be seized by an angry local mayor and his cadre of cartoonishly villainous menfolk who want to build (I kid you not) a men-focused amusement park. The last of the women, Ruby, is about to return home from a stint in prison for a crime that Happened but about which No One Dares Speak. She knows the location of a priceless artifact that has been promised to a demon who will give them money and solve all the immediately pressing issues.
So far so good, but really this is a book about what happens when you don’t speak to one another and let issues fester. I could have done without the entirety of the angry men from town plot, even though it presented a convenient foil, because there were enough conflicts amongst the women to drive the more salient points through.
