Book Review - Ami McKay's The Witches of New York
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.
