The Once and Future Witches

by Alix E. Harrow

Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it. Agnes quit the orphanage. She told the boarding-house girl to brush her own damn hair and started work at the Baldwin Brothers. She figured you couldn’t love a cotton mill.

Every woman draws a circle around herself. Sometimes she has to be the only thing inside it. Agnes quit the orphanage. She told the boarding-house girl to brush her own damn hair and started work at the Baldwin Brothers. She figured you couldn’t love a cotton mill.

I love that later on in the story Agnes makes her circle wider and more inclusive and even though it hurts in the end, she never really regrets it.

the American public still sees women as housewives at best and witches at worst. We may be either beloved or burned, but never trusted with any degree of power.”

This is the blurb I used with my friends to encourage them to read this book. This book states so many truths that have been brushed under the carpet and left to rot. It’s refreshing to name these attitudes out loud and give them the attention they need I order to be recognized and then fixed

Agnes almost laughs at her: Of course she wants a child. Of course she wants to lay its sleeping cheek against her breastbone and smell its milk-sweet breath, to become on its behalf something grander than herself: a castle or a sword, stone or steel, all the things her mother wasn’t.

And it was Agnes who left Juniper to fend for herself, because she wasn’t strong enough to stay. Because survival is a selfish thing.

Sometimes when they’re all together, laughing and arguing, it feels like having sisters again. Juniper can almost forget that Agnes is a seething silence on the other side of the city, that Bella is so stiff and buttoned up it’s like living with a department store mannequin.

Earlier she thought she caught a glimpse of sleek braid, a flash of spectacles, but she can’t bring herself to feel along the invisible threads stretched between them. It’s better to not quite know, to keep pretending they might have come.