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Summary
Summary
Reminiscent of the works of Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, and Octavia Butler, a biting social commentary from the acclaimed author of Lakewood that speaks to our times--a piercing dystopian novel about the unbreakable bond between a young woman and her mysterious mother, set in a world in which witches are real and single women are closely monitored.
Josephine Thomas has heard every conceivable theory about her mother's disappearance. That she was kidnapped. Murdered. That she took on a new identity to start a new family. That she was a witch. This is the most worrying charge because in a world where witches are real, peculiar behavior raises suspicions and a woman--especially a Black woman--can find herself on trial for witchcraft.
But fourteen years have passed since her mother's disappearance, and now Jo is finally ready to let go of the past. Yet her future is in doubt. The State mandates that all women marry by the age of 30--or enroll in a registry that allows them to be monitored, effectively forfeiting their autonomy. At 28, Jo is ambivalent about marriage. With her ability to control her life on the line, she feels as if she has her never understood her mother more. When she's offered the opportunity to honor one last request from her mother's will, Jo leaves her regular life to feel connected to her one last time.
In this powerful and timely novel, Megan Giddings explores the limits women face--and the powers they have to transgress and transcend them.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Giddings (Lakewood) pulls off a dynamite story of a Black woman's resistance in an oppressive dystopia. Jo Thomas's mother, Tiana, has been declared dead after having been missing for 14 years. At 28, the age at which all women must marry or register with the Bureau of Witchcraft, Jo works at the Museum of Cursed Art and is in love with her white best friend, Angie. Tiana taught Jo as a girl that magic wasn't real, but rather a myth to enable oppressions of women and non-cisgender people. Jo is set to inherit a large sum from Tiana on the condition that she agrees to visit an island in Lake Superior, which, according to a story Tiana once told her, only appears once every seven years. The instructions remind her of a story her mother told her as a child, about an island with a treasure. Though Jo doesn't want to leave her sometimes-boyfriend Preston, or her job and Angie, she complies, and upon returning is promptly imprisoned for suspected witchcraft. When Preston promises to take custody of Jo, as required by law, the two enter a tender phase of their relationship. But after the island's secrets leak into the real world, Jo is imprisoned again. Giddings ingeniously blends her harrowing parable of an all-powerful patriarchy with insights into racial imbalances, such as a scene in which Jo and Angie are pulled over by the cops ("I wanted the ease of feeling protected and beautiful enough to try to make a joke, to not have my hands on the dashboard, to not text someone pulled over by cops, please call in 15 minutes if you don't hear from me again"). This is brilliant. Agent: Don Conway, Writers House. (Aug.)
Kirkus Review
An imaginative, lyrical, and--unfortunately--timely parable about structural injustice from the author of Lakewood (2020). Josephine Thomas is single, but she regularly hooks up with a man named Preston. She and her best friend, Angie, write comedy together, but Jo's day job is at the Museum of Cursed Art. She's about to turn 28, which means that--unless she marries soon--she'll have to start reporting to the Bureau of Witchcraft for quarterly testing. The world Jo lives in looks very much like our own, right down to the fact that women who choose to have neither husbands nor children are suspect. The difference is that, in this alternate reality, the law assumes that such women are malevolent sorceresses in league with the devil. Jo's mother taught her both that she was descended from a witch who was burned and that witchcraft isn't real--that it's just an excuse to persecute troublesome women. But her mother's unbelief is not enough to protect Jo--then 14--from accusations of being a witch herself when her mother disappears. And the discovery, years later, that Jo can only claim her inheritance if she collects magical apples from a mysterious island forces her to reexamine everything she thinks she knows about herself. In her first novel, Giddings used tropes from horror and science fiction to explore race and class and generational trauma. Here, she uses fantasy in a similar fashion. And, again, she is particularly interested in what free will means in systems designed to constrain choice. Magic makes women vulnerable. It also empowers them with radical autonomy, and Giddings' descriptions of magic at work are wonderfully evocative. But the pacing, structure, and worldbuilding leave a lot to be desired. The first half of the narrative moves very slowly, and readers who are here for enchantment are likely to be disappointed. The second half, on the other hand, flies by, leaving many nagging questions unanswered. Also, these two halves seem to take place in different universes. At the start of the story, Jo works, enjoys casual sex, goes out for drinks with friends, gets high, and generally lives a life that will be recognizable to many contemporary women. But the Bureau of Witchcraft as it emerges toward the end only makes sense as part of a government and society defined by fundamentalist Christian views that would make such license impossible, and Giddings does nothing to resolve this conflict. Commendably ambitious but only partially successful. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Josephine Thomas' mother disappeared when she was still young. Her mother had always pushed and pressed against the limitations of their world, in which all women must either marry by the age of 30 or be registered, extensively monitored, and limited. Every non-married woman risks being labeled a witch--which then results in the high probability of being tried and burned at the stake. Josephine is feeling increasingly suffocated as her twenty-eighth birthday approaches--as a bisexual Black woman, she knows any subversive behavior will attract severe punishment. When her mother's will asks her to fulfill one strange final request, she and her best friend set out to do it. The book doesn't tread much new ground in the genre of feminist dystopia, and the world-building can be a little unevenly executed. That said, this new book by Giddings (Lakewood, 2020) is an interesting and often thought-provoking novel that looks at a world that enforces heteronormativity in a very limited fashion, and considers how it suffocates women's autonomy and ability to truly live in their world.
Library Journal Review
Giddings returns after her critical hit Lakewood with a sophomore novel set in a slightly sideways near-future--one so close you can see it from here--where fears of witchcraft and restrictions against women provide shelter and cover for laws that put all women under male "protection." That nearly all proven witches are non-white adds racial animus to the misogyny and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred on display everywhere. But is witchcraft real, or is it an excuse? Jo Taylor's search for the mother she thought walked away is her chance to discover the truth, not just about her mother, but about herself and who she as a queer Black woman. Jo's journey through a landscape that combines magical realism with social commentary and horror, exposes a world where all relationships are under duress and raises the question of whether or not there is a place where it is possible to be free. VERDICT Combining the misogynist oppression of The Handmaid's Tale with the sharp insight and SFnal (science fictional) tone of Octavia Butler, Giddings's latest is a chilling but all too plausible tale.--Marlene Harris
