The Seventeenth Book Of 2026: The Once And Future Witches, By Alix E. Harrow
Read May 22 - June 7, 2026
I've been cogitating for a couple of weeks on what to say about Alix Harrow's The Once and Future Witches. Put simply, I found it a really good book, and like most books I get caught up in, it was increasingly difficult to put down the closer I got to the end.
The story is of three sisters living late in an alternate 19th century, who come together after years apart in New Salem, Massachusetts, a city in this story and not the small town it is today. The original Salem was burned to the ground after an infestation of witches and is now a tourist attraction.
Witchcraft lives in this world. Because its power has been forgotten, its magic is small: creating a little light in the night, mending a paper cut, or keeping a door locked. Everyone has the power to use it, though few people do; all they need is a few words or objects, and the desire to accomplish something.
For most of the people of New Salem, witchcraft is evil. Since the destruction of Old Salem, a century earlier, witchcraft has been ignored, and often suppressed.
I won't detail the history of the three sisters at the center of the story, Juniper, Agnes and Belladonna Elliott, except to say they are estranged at the beginning of the story. When they all arrive, seemingly by chance, at a women's suffrage rally in New Salem, the confluence of their mostly latent powers makes a mysterious, rose-covered tower appear for a few moments, long enough to make the sisters aware of each other. The rest of the story is about how their reunion affects them and the world around them.
Suffrage and witchcraft are central to the story, though suffrage in the story gets lost as witchcraft becomes more important. It's very much a story of female empowerment in a time and place when women have very little power but can see an opening for gaining more, despite political opposition and a lack of knowledge of how their supernatural abilities.
Like most good stories, The Once And Future Witches is at its heart a love story. Though there are nods to romantic love, both queer and straight, the most powerful loves are the loves between sisters, the love of a mother for her newborn child, and love for the kindred spirits around them as they fight for a better world for themselves and those who come after them.
As with Alix Harrow's earlier novel, The Ten Thousand Doors Of January, this is a compellingly written fantasy novel, and I'm looking forward to reading more of Harrow's work.
