She wants to reclaim her lost power - the rights to which she and all women are entitled as well as the “words and ways” of witchcraft. Wild and fierce Juniper, the youngest of the three, is rage personified. New Salem is about 100 miles distant from Old Salem, which was destroyed by witchcraft years before and is now just a macabre tourist attraction - a warning to women everywhere about the menace of “witching,” and by extension, the menace of women who do not fall in line.īella, the wise eldest, a librarian at the Salem College Library, seeks refuge in books and stories, those “doors to someplace else, someplace better.” Agnes, the second daughter, the strongest, wants to connect and nurture. They converge in the spring of 1893 on New Salem, a town in an alternate America. They are witches without the craft of witches, wayward women in a world that “binds and bridles” wayward women. They are estranged from one another, broken, impotent, and invisible, all having suffered at the brutal hands of an abusive father. I read Harrow’s anecdotal aside as apt allegory, given that Nobody is who the three Eastwood sisters are at the start of Harrow’s novel, a witch-tale about witch-tales, and the author’s first novel following the Hugo-award-winning portal fantasy The Ten Thousand Doors of January.īella, Agnes, and Juniper Eastwood are nobodies. When the man was asked later who’d cursed him so that she could be found, he exclaimed, Nobody! It was Nobody! The woman was in fact a witch, because as Harrow says, “behind every witch is a woman wronged.” The witch cursed the man, who, in dismay, asked who she was.
Harrow tells us in The Once and Future Witches, a man wronged a woman.
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