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inkandplasma 's review for:
The Year of the Witching
by Alexis Henderson
Full review available from July 27th: https://inkandplasma.wordpress.com/2020/07/27/the-year-of-the-witching-by-alexis-henderson-review/
Rating: 4.5 stars!
Thanks to Bantam Press for the review copy of this book, this hasn’t impacted my honest review.
Trigger Warnings: misogyny, misogynistic slurs, branding, racism, persecution, pedophilia, coercive control, death.
I kept seeing The Year of the Witching advertised as a dark feminist story, and Alexis Henderson absolutely nailed that. It wasn’t the kind of dark that I usually go for, but I liked that. The Year of the Witching didn’t scare me, it empowered me. I honestly read the epilogue with tears in my eyes and a fire in my heart. Cliche? Sure, but I wanted to overthrow the patriarchy and rebuild.
The religious horror in this book included all the story beats I expected for a book featuring witch burnings, but at the same time it was so much worse than I could have anticipated. A lot of the trigger warnings in this book stem from the Prophet and the hyper-religious attitudes towards women. The women in Bethel are property to be handed from father to husband with little agency. Women are chosen as wives, and those married to the Prophet get a symbol carved into their forehead to prove it. Their role is homemaker and child-bearer and men can marry as many women as they want – while women are burned at the pyre for unfaithfulness. The way that Immanuelle and the other women in this book are treated is a misery to watch. By the time the plagues hit, I was rooting for the witches. But Immanuelle made a fascinating protagonist – and a much better person than I am! It turns out I have such a soft spot for infinitely powerful women who choose to Be Good instead of burning the world to the ground with their phenomenal cosmic powers (though for real catch me writing fanfic of Immanuelle heading a coven of witches and spreading plague).
The settings are as glorious and vividly described as they are terrible, and I could so clearly imagine Bethel wrapped in the Darkwood and the insular society that that kind of isolation would build, with the added benefit that no matter how awfully characters behaved, it never seemed outlandish or impossible. I adore horror that hammers home that people are far more dangerous and terrifying than any paranormal influence, and there’s no better setting for that then trapped-in-the-community. I kind of want to know what the world beyond the woods is really like, in the heathen cities, because it felt like Bethel was trapped in history and religious fanaticism.
The most beautiful part of this, to me, was the juxtaposition of the dark, evil actions of Bethel’s men and the Darkwood against Immanuelle’s fierce sense of right and wrong and the pure love she has for everyone around her. I absolutely adore Immanuelle, and I feel like with the right motivation she could do literally anything. It made it so easy to root for her, and left me finishing the book with a feeling of hope despite the darkness in the last part of the story.
Rating: 4.5 stars!
Thanks to Bantam Press for the review copy of this book, this hasn’t impacted my honest review.
Trigger Warnings: misogyny, misogynistic slurs, branding, racism, persecution, pedophilia, coercive control, death.
I kept seeing The Year of the Witching advertised as a dark feminist story, and Alexis Henderson absolutely nailed that. It wasn’t the kind of dark that I usually go for, but I liked that. The Year of the Witching didn’t scare me, it empowered me. I honestly read the epilogue with tears in my eyes and a fire in my heart. Cliche? Sure, but I wanted to overthrow the patriarchy and rebuild.
The religious horror in this book included all the story beats I expected for a book featuring witch burnings, but at the same time it was so much worse than I could have anticipated. A lot of the trigger warnings in this book stem from the Prophet and the hyper-religious attitudes towards women. The women in Bethel are property to be handed from father to husband with little agency. Women are chosen as wives, and those married to the Prophet get a symbol carved into their forehead to prove it. Their role is homemaker and child-bearer and men can marry as many women as they want – while women are burned at the pyre for unfaithfulness. The way that Immanuelle and the other women in this book are treated is a misery to watch. By the time the plagues hit, I was rooting for the witches. But Immanuelle made a fascinating protagonist – and a much better person than I am! It turns out I have such a soft spot for infinitely powerful women who choose to Be Good instead of burning the world to the ground with their phenomenal cosmic powers (though for real catch me writing fanfic of Immanuelle heading a coven of witches and spreading plague).
The settings are as glorious and vividly described as they are terrible, and I could so clearly imagine Bethel wrapped in the Darkwood and the insular society that that kind of isolation would build, with the added benefit that no matter how awfully characters behaved, it never seemed outlandish or impossible. I adore horror that hammers home that people are far more dangerous and terrifying than any paranormal influence, and there’s no better setting for that then trapped-in-the-community. I kind of want to know what the world beyond the woods is really like, in the heathen cities, because it felt like Bethel was trapped in history and religious fanaticism.
The most beautiful part of this, to me, was the juxtaposition of the dark, evil actions of Bethel’s men and the Darkwood against Immanuelle’s fierce sense of right and wrong and the pure love she has for everyone around her. I absolutely adore Immanuelle, and I feel like with the right motivation she could do literally anything. It made it so easy to root for her, and left me finishing the book with a feeling of hope despite the darkness in the last part of the story.