strange and random happenstance: Eleanor St. Clair

Half Spent Was the Night by Ami McKay
Published by: Knopf Canada
Publication Date: October 16th, 2018
Format: Hardcover, 98 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

We are now in the dead days. "Christmas Day has come and gone, the New Year lies ahead. Strange things happen Between the Years, in the days outside of time. Minutes go wild, hours vanish. Idleness becomes a clever thief, stealing the names of the days of the week, muting the steady tick of watches and clocks. These are the hours when angels, ghosts, demons and meddlers ride howling wind and flickering candlelight, keen to stir unguarded hearts and restless minds." Which is why the three witches of New York have closed up their shop until the New Year. The Hermitage won't be attending to their customers, they will be attending to themselves. The three witches, Adelaide Thom, Eleanor St. Clair, and Beatrice Dunn, sit before the fire seeking comfort, companionship, and a glimpse into the future as they all have decisions to make. Which is why the two older witches indulge Beatrice when she suggests they roast chestnuts. Her Aunt Lydia had a tradition that a cracked nut meant "yes" and a burned one meant "no" to whatever question was in your heart. Beatrice's nut cracks, but now she's left with a question that can not be answered with a "yes" or a "no." She's been dreaming of a dark stranger every night. If she could she'd spend all her time asleep with this man. But now she knows that she'll meet him. But when? Whereas Adelaide uses the chestnuts to decide which drink to start with. Which is when the housekeeper, Mrs. Stutt, speaks up. She hasn't become fond of her employer's inamorata yet, but is appalled by what the witches are doing. You should never ask a god to act like an organ grinder's monkey and ask which shell hides the pea. You need to do it properly. Which is what Bleigiessen is. You melt metal until it's molten and drop it into a bucket of cold water. The shape will show you your fate. It's lucky that before the three witches see Mrs. Stutt's reaction to Beatrice's fate that there's a knock on the door. A footman stands in the snow with an invitation for Beatrice to attend A Rauhnächt Masquerade at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on New Year's Eve hosted by the Baroness Berta Weisshirsch. And then another footman arrives. And another. Until all three witches have been invited. While they discuss this last minute invite Beatrice wonders if this is where she'll meet her dream man, while in the kitchen Mrs. Stutt is worried about the darkness that is coming for Beatrice. Darkness that might be tied into the Masquerade where the oddest of people have been invited. The Baroness always knows just the right people to pick and no one has ever failed to appear. But behind it all, is there a motive? Or is she really just a goodhearted woman doing it "for the children?" The witches will find out as the year turns.

This small volume is what I expected from The Witches of New York. A magical, heartwarming yuletide tale full of love, forgiveness, and joyful expectations. I mean, I didn't expect the holiday cheer in the first volume, but you get the drift. I first read Half Spent Was the Night as the year turned and I couldn't have thought of a better read to ring in the New Year. There's just so much hope brimming on every page. But a hope that's tinged with the very real dangers of the world we live in. In simpler terms, this book balances the light and the dark better than its predecessor. Yet you have to have read that book in order to get the magnitude of all that happens in these few pages that you can read over an afternoon. Which, I should ad, work just as well on a sultry summer day as during the dead days of winter. I should know, I just reread it during just such a Saturday afternoon. So what can you expect to happen with our three witches of New York? You can expect a bright future and a tying up of loose ends. This almost reads as a coda to The Witches of New York. It's a glimpse of their lives after the chaos of the previous year has settled down and now they are wistfully looking forward and wondering where their lives will go next now that they are "safe." For Beatrice that means first love, for Eleanor that means taking a leap into a love she unexpectedly found, and for Adelaide it means trusting the man she loves and who wants to marry her with all her secrets. And it's Adelaide's secrets, along with Beatrice's danger, that form the majority of the plot. They need to go from "safe" to safe. Adelaide has a past, which, as I mentioned in my review of The Witches of New York, is only mentioned in passing because it's in a previous volume, The Virgin Cure, that her story is told. She has some danger lurking in the past in the form of a dangerous man. While the danger posed to Beatrice is Mr. Gideon Palsham, the demon Malphas in disguise. At first he wanted to destroy, now he wants to make her his creature. Which is where the Baroness Berta Weisshirsch and her ball come into play. She is far more than she appears. She is the Queen of Witches. And she sees that her three witches of New York might need a little help. Might need someone to run the villains out of town. They are loyal and deserve a special treat for the New Year. And all the loose ends comes together in a beautiful bow and the type of package I can get behind, a dead predator in an alleyway. I know. I have strange tastes in gifts. Or perhaps I just have the tastes of a Queen?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Adelaide Thom, Ami McKay, Beatrice Dunn, Demon, Eleanor St. Clair, Half Spent Was the Night, Masquerade, New Year's Eve, Season of the Witch, The Hermitage, The Virgin Cure, The Wild Hunt, The Witches of New York, Yuletide

The Witches of New York by Ami McKay
Published by: Harper Perennial
Publication Date: July 11th, 2017
Format: Kindle, 537 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

New York City in 1880 is thrumming with change. Even upstate in Stony Point Beatrice Dunn can feel the call. She intends to travel to New York City to answer an ad for a job; "Respectable Lady Seeks Dependable Shop Girl. Those averse to magic need not apply." She can feel it in her bones that this is her destiny. Though getting to New York is another matter entirely. It's as if the world, or at least the railway, is plotting against her. Why does Cleopatra's Needle have to be travelling on the rails the same day she needs to be somewhere? She manages to make it to 933 Broadway near Madison Square Park but it is long after the time she was supposed to be there. While the proprietresses of Tea and Sympathy are nowhere to be found a raven allows her entrance and, despite not believing in the otherworldly, Beatrice meets a ghost. Which is where the daughter of said ghost finds her. Eleanor St. Clair owns the shop with Adelaide Moth. Eleanor was trained by her French mother in the arcane specializing as an herbalist while Beatrice is a seer and can tell fortunes but is still scarred from an attack that took her eye. Eleanor was unaware that Beatrice had placed an ad for a shop girl but when she finds poor Beatrice passed out on the floor with her familiar Perdu keeping watch she has no option but to nurse the girl back to health. Needless to say, Beatrice got the job. What's more, she might be a witch like her two employers. Adelaide has encountered an alienist, Dr. Quinn Brody, whose father has recently passed and who studied all things spiritual. His father had invented a spiritoscope to commune with the dead and which Beatrice was able to use successfully. They plan a public demonstration to show what skills Beatrice has to offer for their clients while also tending to said clients' needs. They bring succor and sustenance to the women who come to their shop. They offer them a place to be safe while also being true to themselves. Being a woman in New York City is hard when you have bible-thumpers on every cover decrying the sins of women. Their small community is all they have and they welcome Beatrice into it. Though she is young and some might think they are taking advantage of that youth. One such person is Reverend Townsend. He saw Beatrice in Madison Square Park and feels that he must save her. One has to ask, what does he think that looks like? Because a man trying to control a woman might go to very dark lengths to do what he thinks is right. And Reverend Townsend has gone to dark lengths before.

When someone says a book is in the "vein" of Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell I should, by now, be savvy enough to know that this is hyperbole. Because no book can come close to that masterpiece, the best it can do is make me love it for itself. Needless to say this book did neither of those things and felt to me like a story in search of its own identity. Did it want to be cozy? Did it want to be cruel? The Witches of New York just couldn't decide and has such an overwhelming identity crisis that I can almost not reconcile the two main themes of female empowerment and male violence. The problem is that the female empowerment takes the shape of tea and ghosts and magic while the male violence is the Reverend murdering women in his basement. Yes, violence against women is very timely, and while this is set in a cozy tea shop, women's rights have never been cozy, they've been plagued by violence and danger and by the Reverends of the world, and yet I felt like Ami McKay was leaning into that cozy vibe. Yes, women need a safe space, but at the same time, by making this book ooze the ambiance of Caleb Carr's The Alienist, I just didn't know how to process it. I felt like I was experiencing whiplash in real time. I mean, I'm sure someone could pull off a book that is Ragtime meets The Master and Margarita but it is not Ami McKay. I mean, dropping a demon in the middle of all this almost seemed farcical. But then again, so much of this book just felt like it needed a second look. For example let's talk about Adelaide Moth. Adelaide Moth has this elaborate backstory. You think you're going to get it here, well, you'd be wrong. Because for a reason that defies comprehension she is actually the protagonist of another of Ami McKay's books, The Virgin Cure. While I have't read The Virgin Cure yet, by having her backstory in another book which I might point out I didn't realize until the end of this book made me feel cheated. I literally felt that I was only getting half the story. And I was. But then again, I don't know if I'll ever figure out who Perdu is, so this book tends to leave you in the dark. And what's infuriating is that Ami McKay says that it's obvious. I'm sorry random poster on Goodreads who said I "need to read or re-read pages 130-133, part of the story of the princess who was cursed. She learns the [n]ame of the demon who faces her and has him grant her a wish." This did not help. Nothing about this book helped. It could have been either this gritty history of New York and magic in the vein of The Alienist which it was close to becoming or gone for cozy Legends and Lattes level cuteness. Instead it's stuck between two states and is like a caterpillar trapped in it's chrysalis that will never become a moth or a butterfly.