This was definitely a great book to end the year with. I still have a few more to go so let’s see where I get before the 31st. I thought the book was pitch perfect and I even cried a little bit at the ending. I loved how everything got looped together, nursery rhymes, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and witches.
The Once and Future Witches follows three sisters (Juniper, Agnes, and Beatrice) in a place similar to our world, doing their best to survive along with men and women in the late 1890s doing their best to thwart a suffrage movement along with the return of witches in a place called New Salem. We start the story with Juniper (the youngest) on the run from something, but we know it’s not good. She feels a tug and realizes she feels someone doing a spell. That spell causes her to run into her two sisters who abandoned her 7 years earlier, Agnes and Beatrice. Both of the sisters have limped along, until the three of them come together again and start to be brought into their sister’s plan to bring the women’s movement that is going on right now into a movement that will bring back witches.
I loved all of the sisters and felt for each of them. Juniper is all impulse. Agnes wants to just ignore the world and be left alone. And Beatrice has stopped even trying to wish for something that she believes is wrong. I do think though that parts of the book were a little slow and I wish that we had more scenes with the three sisters together and just interacting with each other more. I didn’t mind the slow parts/scenes and the fact that the book wasn’t rushing to its conclusion. We got such great secondary characters and I felt like I could have read about everyone for days.
The setting of the book takes place in 1893 in a place called New Salem, built after the last Salem was lost to the ashes. The book focuses not just on fairy tales, but also any story that deals with maiden, mother, and crone. The numbers 3 and 7 years seem to be looped throughout the entire book.
No spoilers, but I did love finding out who the big bad was in the end and how even they were part of a story that was told and retold.
