I liked this but it could have been better. I feel like with a more practiced writer, this story could have been F I R E, or whatever. As is, it’s just a pretty good story. For horror, it was tame. For adult, it skewed young. (It’s not YA, but according to the author, “has crossover appeal,” and I can see that.) For me, it felt much more atmospheric than a lot of YA. Or, at least, the stuff most YA fantasy authors are producing nowadays.
This is a story about Immanuelle, a sixteen year old biracial girl living in a strict religious community called Bethel. Vague history is spoken about regarding some past magical war involving witches and the forest, but the timeline isn’t clear. It’s also unclear if this is our world or another. The level of technology seems to be roughly equivalent to 1600-1700ish. Immanuelle is being raised by her grandmother and grandfather, in a house with his second wife and her young “sisters”, because her mother Miriam died giving birth to her, and her father was burnt in a cleansing fire as punishment for usurping the rights of the Prophet, the leader of the community. The Prophet had been all set to get his gross old hands on Miriam as one of his many wives, but instead she fell in love with a Black man from the outskirts and had his child. The scandal cost her family their wealth and prestige, and now Immanuelle is a living reminder of that time.
The story really picks up (after a lot of table-setting) when Immanuelle is drawn into the forest (where the spirits of the executed witches still live) and accidentally sets off a rash of plagues: blood, blight, darkness, and slaughter. The plagues are the witches’ revenge, and they are gruesome. Unfortunately, the text really doesn’t lean into the horror of them. We get pared down glimpses of what’s going on, and I’m not sure quite how to explain this, but every time something awful happens, it just felt kind of muted to me. It’s like the author was hedging her bets and trying to let in the biggest possible audience for her story, and undercut the story in the process.
The feminist power of this story was also undercut by this approach, in my opinion. I actually thought Immanuelle was a great character to center the story on, because she’s a true neutral, able to see the flaws in both sides of the “magical war”. She was nuanced, even in a story that sort of wanted to wash her out. Anyway, my basic opinion of this book is that it did some really cool things and then didn’t really take any of them to their full conclusion.
I will probably read the next book just because I’m curious, but I don’t have any idea where she could take this as a series. The story feels done to me.
[3.5 stars, rounded down]