One witch you can laugh at. Three you can burn. But what do you do with a hundred?

The Eastwood sisters grew up hard, with a mother dead in childbirth and an abusive father. The older lost as they could and the younger left in a somewhat more… abrupt manner. And then, somehow, they all ended up at the same suffrage rally.

James Juniper. Maiden.

Agnes Amaranth. Mother.

Beatrice Belladonna. Crone.

It’s a fascinating tale, digging into women’s right (suffrage and otherwise), race, homophobia, and sexuality told in an alternate history end of the 1800s, all wrapped a world where witches are real. Where magic lies waiting. And where women’s tales have power.

All of us grew up on stories of wicked witches. The villages they cursed, the plagues they brewed. We need to show people what else we have to offer, give them better stories.

I’m by no means an expert on the time period, so I’ve no idea how much of the characters and events of the stories have a basis in our world, but it has the feel of a world that could very well have been real–something in the world just down the road.

Or perhaps for all of them: for the little girls thrown in cellars and the grown women sent to workhouses, the mothers who shouldn’t have died and the witches who shouldn’t have burned. For all the women punished merely for wanting what they shouldn’t.

I quite enjoyed this book!