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.
This family saga taking place during the first few years of World War II is ostensibly about "the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women" but is really about how awful men are to women. I can't actually believe at one time I viewed this nostalgically as a comfort watch when women are being date raped, having a rape-related pregnancy, having said rape-related baby die, having crucial medical information withheld, and just suffering all the microaggressions women have come to expect on a daily basis. I don't know if I just had my head in the sand the last time I watched this or it was sadly what I, as a woman, just expected. I hadn't been educated enough to see the world around me for what it should be not what it was. Even Hugh Bonneville as the least offensive male Cazalet isn't without sin. Though nothing compares to Stephen Dillane's Edward Cazalet. To put in mildly, his behavior as Stannis Baratheon on Game of Thrones, where he literally takes his daughter Shireen and, you know, burns her alive as a sacrifice for the Lord of Light, is more humane and understandable than his detestable actions as Edward Cazalet. Let me enumerate. Where shall I start? I think I'll start with the least offensive and work my way to the ones that made me so uncomfortable I could barely stand to watch the show. So that means we start with his wife, Villy. Villy, at the age of forty-two has found herself pregnant again. She goes to her doctor and honestly tells him she doesn't think she can handle having another child, to which the doctor says, too bad, Edward will want this child and if you try to do anything stupid I'm coming after you and when is your husband free to play golf? Yes, married women had to normally defer to their husbands in regard to their sexual health, but the fact that the doctor thought he and her husband understood her body more than her just enraged be, especially given the double standard that is about to come up. Because obviously a letch like Edward isn't keeping it in his pants when he's out in the world. First there's a quickly discarded mistress that goes off from whence she came once Anna Chancellor's Diana arrives on the scene. Her and Edward have a yearslong relationship, in fact she has just given birth to Edward's bastard when Villy finds out she's pregnant. But the cherry on the top of the cake, AND the double standard, is when Diana gets pregnant a second time and because of how things stand with her husband she asks Edward to help her get an abortion. Which he is willing to do! Mainly because he's moved on from her with a young girl at the air force base he's stationed at. Though being a controlling and philadering husband isn't the worst of his sins. That would be his feelings towards his daughter, Louise. She's a happy, carefree girl who becomes withdrawn when, after her father takes her out to celebrate her birthday with dinner and a show he sexually assaults her. This won't be the only time. Every time the two of them are in the same scene you feel like he's hunting her. I felt physically ill watching this. It's no wonder the show ends with her marrying an older man, she had to escape. She had to get away from a man whom, as she bluntly said, treats her as his daughter or as his whore as it suits him. I'm queasy just thinking about this. Can we, I don't know, tie Edward up on a nice pyre and light it? We can say it's for the Lord of Light even though it's just for all the women, mothers, wives, daughters, who have been wronged. Who have not been able to do something about it. Let's do it for them. 
The Sisterhood by Tasha Alexander
Newlywed Brits move to New York for husband's job. Husband cheats with coworker. Husband lies and says it was a one time thing. Wife finds out it wasn't. They go on vacation. The trip of a lifetime. Wife doesn't want to repeat the patterns she saw with her parents so decides her husband needs to have an accident. But fate intervenes. They run into the mistress and her boyfriend and the mistress is killed. Things get even messier. The police get involved. Mistress's boyfriend is arrested. Mistress's boyfriend is released. Wife kills mistress's boyfriend. Husband has another mistress. Husband doesn't have a clue. Wife frames him for the murder she herself committed. Wife presumably gets the divorce she wanted all along. Wife writes book. Hopefully it's a bestseller. There's nothing that complicated about this series. It's a simple tale of revenge. But it's the class of acting and the way that Jenna Coleman makes you root for Liv the entire time that make it worth watching. You feel how she has reached her last straw and so want her to kill her husband. As the six episodes unfold you keep having delayed satisfaction. The husband didn't die, but the mistress did. The husband didn't die, but the mistress's boyfriend did. Finally tying it all up by the husband going to prison for the crime the wife committed was such poetic justice. Now some people might say, it was kind of cruel to kill the mistress, as it was really the husband at fault. Well, not in my book. First, it takes two to cheat. Second, yes, I know he was emotionally manipulating her and giving her false hope but again, it takes two to cheat. Third, and most important, when the mistress meets the wife they have a moment of catharsis, a moment where they bond, and after that, like almost right after that, she tries to convince the husband to run away with her. She befriended Liv and then betrayed her, death is her sentence. As for the boyfriend? He deserved to die because he's Eric Balfour. I have hated him since the moment I set eyes on him. I actually would have been fine with him being imprisoned, he could have rotted in jail with his friend Danny Masterson, but he died, and that brings me joy. So much joy. I should maybe make Liv caving in his skull a screensaver... As for framing her husband for the mistress's murder? Well, that's just the cherry on top of the cake. And personally, I'm kind of surprised she got away with it. No one on this show has the bare minimum of knowledge about digital forensics and the omnipresence of cameras. I mean, seriously, what century do you live in? Plus you're from England, which has one of the most monitored cities in the world. But I take solace in the knowledge that if the cops actually were able to access deleted emails on the company's servers they would just implicate the husband more. But it's the final message that is the most important. Liv built her life around a man, she put her life in his hands, and his actions made her a desperate creature. He did make her do this, to an extent. But what is under that is this world women live in, a world where we are constantly in danger, where we have to think about our safety at all times, and enough is enough. Her husband thought she'd wait for him, her husband is one of the many faces of the problem women live with daily. We aren't going to take shit anymore. No more dishonesty, no more danger, we all, like Liv, have no more fucks to give.
The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch
The Case of the Bizarre Bouquets by Nancy Springer
Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
