THE WOMEN COULD FLY

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.