This book is beautifully written and will give a reader all the feels. There is violence throughout, because the bad guy is really bad and the sisters live in a precarious time. They have the most need to be secretive in this time and place and it was heartening to see their relationship grow. Bella and Cleo finding each other is a sweet undercurrent to the main story. The main story is the three sisters learning to trust each other again while having to battle a huge evil in the world with magics they mostly have to hide from an antagonistic society.

There are a series of fable like asides that eventually make sense in the plot but keep a fairytale feel alive through the industrial grind. The author gives the many characters a distinctive voice and the worldbuilding is meticulous, with a setting that mimics the American late nineteenth century industrial northwest and its strict rules and mores, using slightly altered real history to give this history a more realistic feel. The present tense structure of the writing adds a lot to the tension of a world on the brink of chaos and the sisters’ precarious place in it. James Juniper is hiding from the law and her magic but finds working for the suffragists surprisingly fulfilling.Īgnes Amaranth is hiding from a life of magic and family toiling in the grind of industrial textiles.īeatrice Belladonna seems to have established a quiet life in a college library until she meets the jaunty Miss Cleopatra Quinn who crosses the color line seemingly at will as a writer for a local paper and quickly deduces Bella’s dangerous knowledge of things magical and immediate attraction to each other. Three estranged sisters in 1893 New Salem must band together to use illicit magic to save a world that has no use for independent women, and even less for witches.

Harrow is a supernatural thriller set in an alternate history where witchcraft is real but has been outlawed.

The once and future witches