![]() ![]() Mama Megs used to tell the girls fairytales of all kinds, and the girls remembered them as “doors to someplace else, someplace better” (harkening back to Harrow’s first book, The Ten Thousand Doors of January.) She told them that magic would never be totally eliminated “because it beats like a great red heartbeat on the other side of everything.” She also said that proper witching was “just a conversation with that red heartbeat, which only ever takes three things: the will to listen to it, the words to speak with it, and the way to let it into the world. ![]() ![]() Back home, Juniper explained, “every mama teaches her daughters a few little charms to keep the soup-pot from boiling over or make the peonies bloom out of season.” Their grandmother, called Mama Mags, was a healer who taught the girls about herbs and spells. The central characters are three sisters, Agnes, Bella, and Juniper, who grew up with a cruel abusive father – “a mean drunk with hard knuckles who never loved anything or anyone as much as he loved corn liquor.” Their mother died during Juniper’s birth. But it is so much more than that, including historical fiction, magical realism, a story of relationships between family, friends, and lovers, and perhaps most interestingly, a manifesto on feminist sociology and politics. It’s hard to pin down the genre of this book, which at first just seems like a fantasy about witches. ![]()
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