Bingo 12: Dwelling
There’s a probably slightly magically sentient house in this novel, both in the title The Witches of Moonshyne Manor, and in the background as a character, but mostly as a big part of the setting. The magic manor is only one of many many tropes in this novel, to the point where I’m not sure whether this whole novel is full of clichés or it’s actually mildly ironically self-aware.
There’s a sisterhood of witches with the leader type (Queenie), the sexy one (Jezebel, obvs), the plant based one (Ivy), the animal lover (Tabby – do we see the themes in the names yet?), Ursula the clairvoyant, and Ruby (spoilers on who/what she does). Slight twist: everyone is around 80 years old for the now-times parts of the story. There’s also the young innocent who wanders into the middle of the trouble, although she sort of volunteers for some of it (teenager Persephone who is totally into patriarchy bashing, via her chosen mode of TikTok).
The plot threads include the love triangle that’s more of a scatterplot, the Faustian bargain with a dark wizard to save the manor and distillery that the ladies run, a magical ball game that’s a cross between pickleball and pool that involves fire, a ghost, a talking familiar, the mob of townsfolk (Viking horns, camo etc. included), the crazed guy who wants to destroy the sisterhood for some vague family wrong from a generation or three ago, rituals in the woods, and then there’s the secrets multiple witches are keeping from her sisters, the heist that both succeeded and went horribly wrong several decades ago, and the lore of the family grimoire (recipes included).
Sometimes it feels like someone’s trying to be too clever or overdoing the feminist theme; the reason the mob want to destroy the witches is so that they can demolish the manor and distillery to build “Man World” (actual name of proposed shooting range etc. place) led by the Reverend Cotton Mather; Persephone’s dog is named Ruth Bader Ginsburg; the secret the witches tell Persephone about their products (it involves a secret ingredient for the purposes of patriarchy subversion), etc.
This is still a good summer read type of book, although there’s quite a lot that’s underdeveloped (the dark wizard Charon or how the witches got so far behind on their mortgage). Also, warning: this story is narrated in the present tense. Personally, I hate that, and the story never managed to distract me from that for long. The narrator also drops hints in a few places that never go anywhere but are not necessarily red herrings; jerk.