The Bookshop Below by Georgia Summers

Posted on October 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This dark fantasy about the magic of books and the power of love is both heartrending and inspiring.

Georgia Summers (The City of Stardust) renders an enchanting world of self-sabotage, romance, deadly ink magic, and dearly beloved bookstores in her sophomore novel, The Bookshop Below. London was once full of shops where books and the magic they held could be exchanged for the priceless: self-extracted teeth, a lock of hair, a firstborn child. In contemporary times, the force that imbues books and bookshops with their power, through the particular magical workings of booksellers, is fading. Now Cassandra, a disgraced former bookseller, is drawn back into the life that exiled her, just in time to die along with the world she reveres–or, perhaps, to save it.

She’s been living as Cass Holt for years, getting by (and keeping her hands on the books she loves) in the most ignoble fashion: Cass is a book thief. She is also one of the most talented readers–wielders of the magic within enchanted books; now she sells that gift without scruples to whomever can pay. But Cass once had another name: “Cassandra Fairfax, named after a woman whose words melted into thin air no matter how truthful they were, with the surname of a character in disguise from a novel by a long-dead author. Layers upon layers of insubstantiality.”

Summers’s enchanting fantasy opens with Cassandra in great danger, called to return, reluctantly, to the bookshop where she was raised, trained, and then banished by her mentor, Chiron. She was once his protégé, destined to become an owner one day. Now, just as suddenly, she finds herself reinstated, struggling to rehabilitate Chiron’s decayed shop “and all its finicky, unpredictable moods.” She is in over her head, wrestling with her considerable guilt over past crimes against bookshops, against the underground river that powers the bookshop systems in ways Cassandra has yet to understand, and against Chiron himself. She is in danger from enemies who know about her deeds as Cass Holt, and whatever is threatening the bookshops. Cassandra must manage a bookseller she feels lucky to hire, a wonderfully capable woman named Byron; a handsome, magnetic rival named Lowell Sharpe; and the duty she feels to solve the mysteries of what happened to Chiron and why the magic bookshops are disappearing. Cassandra is not sure she wants to be here at all, let alone on the hook for saving everything she knows from destruction. But she feels she owes a debt. She finds she cares about people she never expected to. And she uncovers an enormous secret about her own origins that upends the stakes entirely.

The Bookshop Below offers a delicious combination of shadowy, sinister magic, wistful romance, propulsive action, and the utter reverence one holds for the right book. Summers excels at transporting her readers to a dreamy otherworld where anything is possible.

This review originally ran in the September 26, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 mugs that say “I slay comma splices.”

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Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi

Posted on October 13, 2025 by pagesofjulia

My first Onyebuchi is an interesting one to characterize as to genre. Harmattan Season is a PI story with some classic noir elements: protagonist Boubacar is down on his luck, a little self-sabotaging, unsure of what he’s working toward, fighting some old demons and secrets. It’s historical fiction, set in a West African nation under French colonial rule in a not-quite-modern timeline. It’s fantasy, or speculative fiction: there is magic afoot. One could argue it’s dystopian, but the colonial rule bit kind of covers that already.

Onyebuchi has a firm grasp of pacing and suspense, and Bouba is a compelling central character. He’s mixed race, or deux fois (“two times”), half French and half indigenous, and struggles with that identity: does it mean he gets part of each of two worlds? Or none of either? Does he fit in a little bit everywhere, or nowhere at all? The reader will learn slowly that his in-between status is further indicated morally by some of his past actions.

“Fortune always left whatever room I walked into, which is why I don’t leave my place much these days.” In the opening scene, Bouba is awakened in the middle of the night by banging on his front door. A woman stumbles in, holding a bleeding abdominal wound. She asks him to hide her; he does, as the police arrive next. One of them, it turns out, is an old associate of Bouba’s – you might even say a friend, or the closest thing he has. They leave. The woman has vanished. Unpaid, Bouba spend most of the rest of the novel trying to solve the mystery of the bleeding woman: who she was, what happened to her. He will uncover many layers of intrigue, wrongdoing, and attempted corrections, in spheres both political and personal.

I think a better grasp of West African history and politics would have given me a deeper understanding of some plot elements – and some linguistic background might have helped as well. There were a few unfamiliar words, some of which I got from French (like deux fois), some of which seem to belong to Onyebuchi’s fictional world (dugulenw), but some of which are not his invention (like the title’s harmattan, a dry seasonal West African wind). How many of the latter, or how many slight variations or references, did I miss? This is a good example of how reading ‘the other’ can be a bit more challenging but also why it’s important to do it. I’m just noting where I might have missed some nuance. Partly, I think, for this reason, I had a slow time getting engaged with the momentum of the plot, but we got there, and I wound up feeling involved with Bouba’s wellbeing and that of the community he gradually decided he belonged to.

I think Onyebuchi is a skilled writer with a fascinating and fresh take on genre intersections, and I’m curious about what else he’s done.

Rating: 7 apples.

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The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes

Posted on October 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Delightful, unpredictable, and often harrowing, this mother-daughter tale of growing and learning will keep any reader riveted.

With The White Hot, Quiara Alegría Hudes (My Broken Language; Pulitzer Prize-winner for the play Water by the Spoonful) offers an expansive, surprising coming-of-age story about both a mother and a daughter. The novel opens on Noelle’s 18th birthday, when she receives an envelope. “It wasn’t the handwriting that dinged memory’s bell so much as the pen’s feral indentations.” Since she was 10, when her mother disappeared, Noelle has lived with her father, stepmother, and two half-brothers in New Jersey. Readers have just met the teenager when the voice shifts. “Dear Noelle… I am not going to send this,” the letter begins. What at first masquerades as an interlude quickly takes over the book. Breathlessly, alongside Noelle, readers take in April Soto’s story.

“That awful day began with your classroom art show.” At age 26, April is weary. Her 10-year-old daughter is precocious, an artistic and academic genius, and disturbingly observant of her mother’s shortcomings. Their household comprises four generations of Soto women: Abuela Omara (who emigrated from Puerto Rico), Mamá Suset, April, and Noelle, “not a speck of dust–or man–in sight.” April is undone by her child’s gimlet eye, her own unrealized potential, her lack of options, and daily drudgery, and in the wake of a scene at the dinner table, she simply walks away from their Philadelphia home.

What follows is an epic and astonishing journey of self-discovery. April muses on the influence of Hermann Hesse, Charles Mingus, sex as revelation, violences witnessed and perpetrated; she undertakes a wilderness trek (profoundly unprepared in sandals and sequins), and experiences painful, blissful realizations via blisters and hunger. She tells her child she knows her leaving was a betrayal, but hopes she has also offered choice. By book’s end, the briefest return to Noelle’s own 20s presents a full-circle perspective of the parallels in these two lives, and the significant differences.

April’s narrative is astounding and vibrant. In her best and worst moments, she describes being cracked open, experiencing epiphanies: “She felt an un-looming, a separation into threads, some of which rose and drifted through nearby windows whose unseen inhabitants shimmered inside her, too.” These, as well as the mundane, yield stunning, lightning-bolt prose: “Within this deluge, the frog and the oak, the tuba and congregants were not discrete phenomena but native to each other, and I to them. That I of all creatures should be tapped for a glimpse? A bewilderment.” The White Hot is wide-ranging, thought-provoking, tender, and raw–unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the September 23, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 olives.

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shorts by C. L. Polk: “St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid”; Ivy, Angelica, Bay; The Music of the Siphorophenes

Posted on October 6, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I have been missing Polk’s Kingston Cycle (starting with Witchmark), and was pleased to find a few shorts (for free!) on their website. Here are one short story and two novelettes. (The last is offered with two spellings! Apologies if I’ve used the ‘wrong’ one here.)

“St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid” is a short story with some sweetness in its protagonist’s devotion, and in the honey produced by her mother’s bees, but also darkness, in the prices we pay and the love that is not returned. Theresa’s mother is a powerful magician, a mistress of the bees. Theresa was the price she exacted from a client. She is protected and privileged, but not loved. She will make her own deals for the sake of her own affections. As I recognize from other Polk works, this story combines a dreamy, weighted atmosphere and deep feeling in a delicious blend, with a mythic tone and a character I care deeply about in just a short span of time.

I was even better pleased to find Theresa again, grown up, in Ivy, Angelica, Bay. The heartbreak hits a bit harder here, perhaps because we are growing up. But she’s coming into her powers, as well. The ending offers a twist I love, with opportunities; I wonder if we might hope for more fiction, perhaps at novel-length, in this world: Theresa and the other mistresses of the bees who come before and after, and the world of good people but also darkness in which they move.

The Music of the Siphorophones or Siphorophenes (no cover image I could find) comes from a slightly differently imagined world. Where the bees wield their power in a world that looks a lot like ours, this novelette reminds me a bit of The Expanse: space pilots in a future universe in which ‘spacers’ (who live on ships and stations and planets far from human origins) have developed very differently from ‘grounders’ (mostly-Earthbound people), and there are galaxies’ worth of threats to consider in interspace travel, from pirates to intrigue in politics and entertainment, and good old-fashioned human trauma. But also the Sirens, who offer (reputedly) something like a religious experience to those lucky enough to encounter them. There will be big moral questions on offer for our small cast of characters here, and again, opportunity for this world to grow into more writings for Polk, if they desire it. I hope they do.

This continues to be a talent I’d like to hear more from.

Rating: 7 bulbs of water.

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Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith

Posted on October 3, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Mutual Interest is my favorite book I’ve read this year. I loved it. It’s wry, witty, heartrending, extremely cleverly written, and takes a massively wide-angle lens that charmed me enormously. I’m going to keep this review brief and vague, because (even more than usual) I want to recommend that you head into this book knowing as little as possible about plot specifics. If that doesn’t suit you, I can offer you my colleague’s very fine review at Shelf Awareness, which sold me on the book in the first place: longer version here, shorter here.

Here is what I do want you to know:

This brilliant second novel (following Glassworks, which I have not read) is set mostly in Manhattan at the turn of the century from 1800s to 1900s. Our chief protagonist is from Utica, NY, where an unsatisfactory childhood sends her out into a wider world, wringing a life out of her charm, machinations, expert read of other humans, and desperation. Vivian is, arguably, a bit of a con artist, and certainly a master manipulator, but in her own mind, she improves the lot of those she works upon even as she improves her own; she would like us to believe that her exploits are benign, and she is so skilled that we mostly believe her. Eventually, her life will intertwine (she will quite purposefully intertwine it) with two others, in both public and private spheres. I think I’m going to stop there.

Between the ups and downs, loves and heartaches, foibles and hilarities, mad successes and stomach-dropping setbacks of Vivian and her two friends, Wolfgang-Smith employs an immensely omniscient narrator to make observations about the shape of a wide, wide world. “Time and cause unravel in all directions,” this voice tells us, and it all starts with a volcanic eruption, and a bicycle. This astonishing, entertaining, wrenching novel left me reeling; I hope you love it, too.

Rating: 10 manhole covers.

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Maximum Shelf: Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions by James Workman and Amanda Leland

Posted on September 26, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on September 11, 2025.

Journalist and entrepreneur James Workman and Amanda Leland, executive director of Environmental Defense Fund, present a rare story of ecological recovery with Sea Change: Unlikely Allies and a Success Story of Oceanic Proportions. In the concept known as “catch shares,” fishers are allotted proportional shares of a limited quantity of fish to be harvested; the demonstrated outcome improves the health of fisheries as well as the lives and livelihoods of commercial fisherfolk. Through the lens of engaging characters and locally based stories, Workman and Leland suggest this strategy may be applicable to other challenges around the world: “This revolutionary social contract with the sea has not only slowed, stopped, and in some cases reversed the devastating effects of overfishing along our coasts, but the centrality of pragmatism and collaboration could help solve some of the thorniest and most urgent natural resource challenges we confront worldwide–including the climate crisis.”

In an easy-to-read, storytelling style, Workman and Leland describe how catch shares have been proposed and enacted, often amid great conflict. The authors also detail how this strategy has led to safer and more profitable fishing while helping recover fish populations. Even former opponents have become involved in supporting and expanding such programs. Sea Change wisely focuses on delightful, colorful characters, opening with Keith “Buddy” Guindon, who grew up fishing the Great Lakes and then made a career in Galveston, Tex. Big, brash, a self-described pirate with a “reputation as a grim reaper of the aquatic world,” he’s an ideal protagonist. “A barrel of a man with amused eyes, a gruff voice and a Santa Claus beard, Buddy is a Galveston legend.” Since arriving there in the late 1970s, “he has consistently outmuscled and outfoxed every other fisherman in the western Gulf.” An early, outspoken detractor of catch shares, Buddy rapidly morphed into one of its champions, proselytizing across the United States and the world.

Fisheries in the United States and around the world have been, in recent years, suffering various stages of overuse. As the problem grows exponentially–fewer fish, longer hours, greater rush in more unsafe conditions, lower prices–so does the solution. When fishermen are assured of their fair share of the total catch, they can be more methodical, efficient, and selective about their work. They can avoid dangerous weather conditions, work shorter shifts with less rush, save on fuel, reduce bycatch and waste, bring in higher-quality product and command higher prices, even tailor their harvest to market. In Alaska’s pollock fishery, for example, “Each shareholder could set a unique and more unhurried pace to catch his quota. Vessels dropped trawl nets into the sea less often and more selectively, with fewer ‘tows’ per day. Waste from having to throw back both regulatory discards (fish that are marketable but illegal to keep) and accidental bycatch (species with no market value) plummeted. Fishermen began to insist on and provide credible data, sharing information on how much they caught where and at what time just as soon as it was available.”

Moreover, as the fish population, health, and habitat recover, fishers and communities become safer and more secure. Fishermen like Buddy, generally fiercely independent individualists, learn to work together not only in allocating shares but in enforcing rules and developing technologies to assist in transparency and improved fishing practices. Fishers learn to work with scientists and environmentalists–not traditional partners–and everyone with a stake in the fishery’s health learns to play a more responsible role.

Often following Buddy’s own journey, Sea Change is structured as a movement from the microcosm to the macro, in sections titled “Personal,” “Local,” “Regional,” “National,” and finally “Global,” where readers see Buddy travel to Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, and share his support for catch shares with Japan’s commercial harvesters. The narrative progresses from highly specific successes to globally applicable potentials. Coercive, top-down policies set by government or environmental agencies had long rankled the likes of Buddy, who reflexively pushed back; but catch shares depend on cooperative buy-in from the fishers themselves and incentivize them to protect overfished populations of their own volition.

Catch shares is in some ways an innovation, but also based on traditional relationships across many small coastal societies throughout history: the concept that everyone takes a share according to ability and need, and that everyone contributes to responsible stewardship. It is a version of the concept of the commons, in which a public resource is both used and maintained by the public. The “tragedy of the commons,” in turn, is the fear that if one party does not use up their share–or more than their share–another will. This mindset encourages irresponsible use: if someone else is going to overharvest, it might as well be me, some might think. But with appropriate monitoring–another piece of the system whose development wound up actively involving fishermen–Buddy and the others were able to relax, build trust, and fish smarter.

From local fisheries to global trends, Sea Change samples best and worst practices to highlight the great promise of catch shares to help both fish populations and the people who rely upon them for livelihoods and nutrition. This accessible study emphasizes galvanizing opportunities to make positive change in myriad other areas of policy and sorely needed optimism in the world of environmental thinking and planning.

Rating: 6 hooks.

Come back Monday for my interview with Workman & Leland.

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The Language of Ghosts by Heather Fawcett

Posted on September 22, 2025 by pagesofjulia

With this, I have read all of Fawcett’s published books (although I do have Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter on preorder). Sad day.

The Language of Ghosts, offered for middle grade readers, continues to please. In the opening pages, young Noa is sorely grieving the recent death of her mother, queen of Florean. Her brother Julian is newly crowned king although just a teenager. Florean is an archipelago nation, long ruled by the Marchena family of which Julian is now the eldest. The Marchenas are all magicians, and Julian, like his mother, is a dark mage: this means that instead of speaking just one magical language (like most magicians in their realm), they have multiple languages. Julian is completely unique in that he can speak all nine. The Princess Noa, at eleven, is unique among the Marchenas for having no magic at all. In this opening scene, we find her dashing out of the banquet hall in tears at the presentation of their late mother’s favorite dessert (raspberry sundae). Hiding with her emotions in her closet that night, Noa is able to avoid the assassins who come to kill her and her little sister, five-year-old Mite; together the three siblings escape a violent coup in a small fishing boat and set up housekeeping on a new island. Whew.

Fast forward two years. Julian, a powerful magician but with very little think-first instinct, strategy, or perhaps even common sense, is much assisted by his younger sister Noa, who has no magic but lots of strategy, planning, and organizational skill. Cataloging, listing, and mapping are among her passions. Young Mite has two interests: insects and getting dirty. Well, and food. Operating as a king-in-exile with a small but important following, Julian both relies on Noa’s talents and also tends to discount her. Mite follows her around endlessly. The reader might surmise that the smallest Marchena has been through some trauma and finds constant contact with a sibling comforting; Noa is just annoyed.

Julian has enchanted the island of Astrae so that it moves, like a large ship, piloted by his loyal former-pirate captain Kell. They’ve been roaming the seas, taking back Florean one island at a time, but under constant threat by the usurper king, Xavier. Noa, the star of this story, is hard at work on two missions: to get her brother back on the throne where he belongs. And, privately, to prevent the dark magic he wields from turning him to darkness. The Marchenas discover that Xavier is on the hunt for a weapon that could take Julian down: one or more lost magical languages. Our young royal siblings know that they must get there first. Imagine everyone’s surprise when it turns out that, of all people, previously non-magical Noa is the only one who can speak the language of death. She is herself split between puffed-out pride at her new power, and a desperate desire to speak to her mother again. And to save Julian and the Florean kingdom, of course.

The Language of Ghosts showcases Fawcett’s best features. These are three rather ‘normal’ siblings, underneath all the magical and royal trappings: they have three distinct personalities and sets of skills and interests, and are experiencing different phases of childhood. They clash constantly but love each other dearly. Meanwhile, they dwell in a world that emphasizes Fawcett’s imaginative powers, with magical languages, dragons, illusions, sea monsters, betrayals, intrigue, and a wide array of wonderful cakes. Noa is engaged in learning some of the most important lessons of growing up, including the idea that even when we want the best for our loved ones, we can’t control them. I love the nuance Fawcett gives her young characters. Like the others, this is a book that manages to be funny and silly, heartfelt, harrowing, and wholesome. I would follow this author anywhere.

Rating: 8 mouthfuls of octopus pie (throwback to The Islands of Elsewhere).

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Her One Regret by Donna Freitas

Posted on September 15, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A young mother confesses regret in this satisfying, dynamic mystery that is also a rousing conversation starter about an experience of motherhood still treated as taboo.

Donna Freitas’s Her One Regret explores what one of her characters calls “the last taboo of motherhood.” At once a rocket-paced crime tale of suspense and a thoughtful examination of cultural dictates about motherhood, this novel of women’s lives and relationships excels as both entertainment and a call to difficult but necessary conversations.

In a brief introductory section, readers meet Lucy in the parking lot of a supermarket in Narragansett Beach. On a gorgeous, early fall afternoon, she loads groceries alongside her nine-month-old daughter, Emma. Then begins Part I: “The First 48 Hours.” Lucy has vanished; Emma is found, alone, crying, but perfectly fine, in the parking lot. The small Rhode Island community is horrified, united in a search for the missing mother. But then it is revealed that Lucy had recently confided in her best friend, Michelle, that she regretted having Emma. She had fantasized about staging her own disappearance. The community and the nation erupt in harsh judgment. Is Lucy a kidnapping victim, or on the run? Is she a monster? What do we make of a woman who regrets motherhood?

The rest of Freitas’s narrative jumps between the lives of four local women. Lucy is seen mostly in memory, or as a symbol. Michelle is devastated by her best friend’s disappearance, in love with her own role as mother, but galvanized to defend her friend. Lucy had tried to tell Michelle what she was suffering, but “Michelle did the thing everybody does with mothers: dismiss their feelings as not real. Michelle gaslit Lucy, kept gaslighting her. She hadn’t meant to.” Diana, a retired detective, is drawn to Lucy’s case and its similarities and differences from other vanished women. And then there is Julia, whose baby is the same age as Emma: “Julia keeps waiting for the moment she’ll feel bonded to her son, that miracle other women talk about when connection and unbelievable love will flood her person and overcome the dread, the sadness, the resistance. But it never happens.” Julia, an artist who can no longer bring herself to create, sees herself in Lucy, shares the fantasy of escape, and now watches as the world on social media condemns her parallel self. Her desperation feels like an emergency no one around her will acknowledge.

Freitas (Consent; The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano) relates these lives and quiet–or in Lucy’s case, suddenly very public–struggles with nuance and compassion. Her One Regret is purposefully thought-provoking and a riveting mystery–a masterpiece of duality, not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the September 5, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 sketches.

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The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle by T.L. Huchu

Posted on September 12, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Book three of Edinburgh Nights (The Library of the Dead; Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments) might be the best yet. Ropa is still pushing on in her unpaid internship for the Society of Sceptical Enquirers (or rather, its secretary, her patron, Sir Ian Callander), and at this book’s start, she finds herself at Dunvegan Castle on the Scottish Isle of Skye, assisting with the biennual conference. This should be low-level drudgery, but Callander is good about keeping Ropa handy; and anyway, events quickly take a turn for the unusual, necessitating Ropa’s special skills in solving mysteries. A prestigious Ethiopian magician comes to visit, a priceless ancient scroll (valued both as an antiquity and for the secrets it contains) is stolen, and a librarian – Ropa’s favorite, in fact – is murdered. And our young hero is on deck to save the day. But where she has some experience solving crimes and battling magicians, here at Dunvegan she might just be outclassed. Everybody on site except Ropa, it seems, is a professionally trained magician. Academia and the Society have turned out much less virtuous than she’d imagined. With the written advice of Niccolò Machiavelli running through her mind, Ropa decides she can trust no one. Even her heroes are suspects.

This might be the saddest in the series, as Ropa becomes disillusioned with the society and the Society she had been so keen to join. We continue to admire her for her own strong morals, even if standing on principle sometimes gets her in arguably unnecessary trouble. But her ideals are shaken as she finds out that the people she’d looked up to are fallible.

That said, it’s a great story, expertly paced and compelling, with characters we care about. And I was thinking this was a trilogy, but this book ends on a hell of a cliffhanger, and I’m glad to see there are four published books in the series with a fifth due in December! So I’m pleased to be hooked by Huchu’s singular and unforgettable young ghostalker-turned-investigator. Get on board.

Rating: 8 servings of cranachan.

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Witchcraft by Sole Otero, trans. by Andrea Rosenberg

Posted on September 8, 2025 by pagesofjulia

This graphic novel follows an unusual household over several centuries in Buenos Aires, Argentina, through various characters whose lives are impacted, if not ruined, by three enigmatic sisters.

Argentinean comics artist Sole Otero (Mothballs) offers a tale that meanders through historical and speculative fiction with Witchcraft, a graphic novel that spans centuries in Buenos Aires. In Otero’s evolving but recognizable visual style, the opening scene emerges spookily from the fog, as a ship arrives in Nuestra Señora del Buen Ayre in 1768. (One of a series of footnotes explains that this was the original name of Buenos Aires, given by the conqueror Pedro de Mendoza.) Readers see three women disembark with their goat, taking with them the three-year-old son of another passenger, to the latter’s wails of despair. From these early, atmospheric pages, a sense of unease is established and maintained.

The following sections of the narrative undertake large jumps in time. In more or less present-day Buenos Aires, a man tells his friend a scarcely credible story of nude women dancing around entranced nude men, with a goat and a chalk circle and “this super creepy music.” In an earlier, historical setting, a Mapuche woman goes to work at a grand estate for three sisters who are both feared and respected in their local village, to a horrifying end. In modern times, a reclusive woman exchanges e-mails with a similarly lonely man, the veterinarian who came on a house call to look at her sick cat; he tells strange, disturbing tales about his family and the elderly goat they want him to save. A nunnery sends an allegedly evil orphan girl to live with three sisters who normally adopt only boys. From these and other narrative threads, populated by spirits, witch hunts, pleas and losses, readers begin to piece together the fractured story of the María sisters and their unusual, perhaps supernatural, habits.

Otero’s style of illustration varies somewhat between sections, but is often distorted or off-kilter, and highly detailed; in full color, her characters’ facial expressions and contortions advance the unnerving atmosphere of the larger story. Page spreads may include carefully spaced panels or no panels at all; text style likewise shifts, with infrequent footnotes to help readers along. This results in a sinister, mysterious, and deeply compelling reading experience. Translated by Andrea Rosenberg (who also translated Otero’s Mothballs), Witchcraft blends horror, dark magic and dark humor, rage and righteousness. This disjointed, sometimes discomfiting, entertaining story addresses colonial power and indigenous resistance alongside ritual, sex, and sacrifice in an eerie, phantasmagoric package not soon forgotten.

This review originally ran in the August 18, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 6 trees climbed.

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