witches

In 1893, witch trials are rampant, especially in the town of New Salem.  Juniper, Agnes, and Bella are three sisters bound together by magic after years of separation.  While having to work through buried conflicts with themselves and each other, these sisters realize how magic and witchcraft are on the brink of extinction.  Together, these sisters work with witches in the town of New Salem to combat the misogyny and anti-witch attitudes that dominate New Salem society, all the while learning the value of their own witching abilities and womanhood.

The most compelling aspect of the book was

“Lesson one,” Anatov said. “And this is for all of you. Learn how to learn. Read between the lines. Know what to take and what to discard.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch

This young-adult culturally diverse fantasy, set within the modern times, centers on Sunny Nwazue, an adolescent born to Nigerian parents in the United States. A couple of years before our story begins, Sunny's family moved back to the Federal Republic of Nigeria, where our primary woman of steel currently lives with them just outside a tiny town. Sunny “confuse[s] people,” she explains in her own voice, not only thanks to

It's that time of year where my reading generally turns to the spookier side, and there's no paranormal motif I love more than witchy women. Fiction has definitely seen an uptick in feminist reclamations of witchy tropes and depictions in recent years, and I am here for it.

When I first saw the publication announcement for Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft, I struggled to keep my expectations reasonable, certain it would be yet another teen fiction anthology that sounded amazing and would end up disappointing me with uneven story quality. But I was only so successful in

"Genre mashups," where an author takes two different genres or sub-genres--for example, romance and steampunk or hardboiled detective and science-fiction--are not exactly new, but they have become a hot topic lately. With her debut novel All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders has done something different, taking a character in a modern fantasy story and a character in a near-future, dystopian SF story and having their lives intertwine in friendship and romance, without mashing up the different genres they belong in. It's like if Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen lived in the same world

The second book in the Echo Park Coven series picks up immediately after the end of the first book, The Witches of Echo Park. Lyse and her fellow witches, or blood sisters as they prefer to call themselves, have a major threat called "the Flood" looming over them. It isn't long before the Flood comes in and washes the coven, and the plot, in many different, dangerous directions.

When I reviewed The Witches of Echo Park, I said the book moved at a leisurely pace, slowly introducing the cast of characters and the urban fantasy setting, letting the readers get to know everyone, until the end

As he does for everyone in the end, Death has come for Granny Weatherwax.  The finest leader the witches never had, indisputably first amongst equals, Granny bequeaths her legacy to young Tiffany Aching.  Tiffany struggles to do the job in front of her when she has to manage her own steading, Granny's steading, train a new apprentice (and never before has a boy wanted to be a witch!), and stop the elven incursion into her world.  Not to mention reining in the Nac Mac Feegle clan.  Crivens!

I gave this four stars for lack of ease for new readers.  Even if you've read all of the Tiffany Achin