The Once and Future Witches follows the three Eastward sisters as they raise hell, fight for women, and work to restore and preserve women's power through witching. This novel is set in an alternative historical setting (this threw me for a loop a couple times) and begins in 1893 in New Salem amid the suffrage movement and witch hysteria. Bella, Agnes, and Juniper have experienced all the challenges and horrors of being women in a world where they don't have a voice. But they find strength in each other and fight to win a place and acceptance in their world. This book is very much an story of women finding their way through pain, abuse, and hurt to power and the importance of memory, writing, and storytelling.

So many things gave me high expectations for this book. I loved Alix Harrow's debut, The Ten Thousand Doors of January. I love atmospheric, lush prose, magical realism, stories with folklore and fairy tale backgrounds, and stories that explore the power of storytelling. I had minor reservations for witching (I'm not really into occult stories), but I was super excited to read Harrow's newest book.

Maybe my expectations were too high, because I just really struggled with The Once and Future Witches. I don't mind slow pacing, but it can be tricky to capture both a magical feeling while not lagging in pace. I was a third to halfway through the book before I really felt invested in the story. In the beginning I struggled with some continuity things and the pacing felt at turns slow and rushed. You switch between the three sisters as POV characters, but there were cases where I got confused about which character I was with and their voices didn't always come through clearly. I thought the character work was fine, but I also just didn't find the characters particularly compelling. Maybe I'm just not enough of an angry feminist.

By the middle of the book, the story was ramping up, there was a more action and fire, and we seemed to get past most of the writing foibles. Unfortuantely they reappear during the climax of the book. I found myself confused and frustrated, and then I'd have to flip back a couple pages to try to figure out what happened. And we have two writing/storytelling pet peeves [MINIMAL SPOILERS]:

Spoiler

1. the villian explaining his motivations (because it wasn't really explained well enough inside the story) and 2. people stopping in the middle of a battle to have important character moments.

This makes me sound so negative about the book, but I did like a lot of things. There was some beautiful prose (and some wonderful parrallelism that is just stunning), the setting was dark but compelling, it was a bit mysterious and creepy but not overdone, and the folklore and storytelling elements were very well done. There are some important issues raised, although at times it felt like the feminism and anger was a little too much for me personally. There are going to be people for whom the importance of the ideas make up for anything other reservations they might have, and that's totally fine.

I think this could have been an amazing book, but it felt a little rushed and inconsistent. I think if there had been another beta read or some more time, I think a lot of the writing things that bugged me could have been smoothed over. If I'm being honest, I might have DNF'd this one if it hadn't been an ARC just because of pacing (and I do not DNF lightly). I'm going to read more of Harrow's work, because I know that she can write stunning stories, but The Once and Future Witches was a disappointment.

Thanks to Orbit and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.