What We Sacrifice for Magic by Andrea Jo DeWerd Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fantasy, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 304
Published by Alcove Press on September 24, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Perfect for fans of Practical Magic and The Lager Queen of Minnesota: a coming-of-age novel following three generations of witches in the 1960s, this enchanting and heartwarming debut explores the importance of family and the delight and heartbreak of discovering who you truly are.
It’s 1968, and the Watry-Ridder family is feared and respected in equal measure. The local farmers seek out their water charms, and the teenagers, their love spells. The family’s charms and spells, passed down through generations of witches descending from the Black Forest, have long served the small town of Friedrich, Minnesota.
Eldest daughter Elisabeth has just graduated high school—she is expected to hone her supernatural abilities to take over for her grandmother, the indomitable Magda. She’s also expected to marry her high school sweetheart and live the rest of her life in Friedrich. But all she can ask is, why her? Why is her path set in stone, and what else might be out there for her?
She soon discovers that magic isn’t the only thing inherited in her family. That magic also comes with a great price—and a big family secret. The more she digs, the more questions she has, and the less she trusts the grandmother she thought she knew. Who is Elisabeth without her family? She must ultimately decide what she’s willing to sacrifice for her family, for their secrets and their magic, or risk it all to pave her own way.
Navigating the bittersweet tension between self-discovery and living up to familial expectations, What We Sacrifice for Magic is a touching look at coming into one’s own.
My Review:
The Age of Aquarius might have dawned in the rest of the world, but 1968 in tiny Friedrich, Minnesota seemed like it would be no different from the year before, or the year after. The witches of the Watry-Ridder family had been doing their very best – and occasionally their damndest – to make sure that life in the town they held under their protection stayed protected and pretty much the same.
Helped by the fact that it was a teeny-tiny farming community and change came even slower to those sorts of towns than it did to the big cities – and a few well-placed memory charms helped with the rest.
But 1968 was the year that Elisabeth Watry-Rider graduated high school – and was expected to settle down in Friedrich, marry the boy she’d been dating for two years, and take up the reins of her family’s magical power – reins that had been firmly held in the iron grip of her grandmother Magda since long before Elisabeth was born.
No one has ever asked Elisabeth what she wants. Not that she hasn’t always enjoyed the attention of being Magda’s favorite, and not that she hasn’t pitied both her mother and her younger sister Mary, whose powers seem to be considerably less than her own.
As Elisabeth feels the walls closing in, she envies them both their freedom from the strait-jacket of the family legacy. She begins to ask questions about why she is the one who must give up all her freedom, while everyone around her has choices. Choices that the formidable Magda took from her when she was too young to even have a voice to protest with.
Before the bars of her prison of expectations clang shut for good, Elisabeth publicly defies her grandmother, accidentally sets fire to half the town, and flees into the night. Clawing out just a little tiny space of time to see who SHE wants to be when she grows up.
It’s the making of her – even as it breaks the back of her family and shatters the community’s faith in their powers. But some things are made to be broken, and some family secrets have to be exposed before the light of hope and possibility can have a chance to heal what’s – and who’s – been torn apart.
Escape Rating B: If Hazel Beck’s Witchlore and The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradel had a book baby, with Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic serving as either the midwife or the fairy godmother – or both – that book would be What We Sacrifice for Magic.
The title manages to tease the story without giving it away, and it’s a doozy but not in the way I expected, which leads back to those books I think contributed to its DNA.
Even though Lager Queen isn’t a book about magic, it is a story about family secrets and family rifts in a similar setting to What We Sacrifice for Magic with similar family dynamics. It’s a story about family traditions carried on by the women of the family, and the stresses and strains of a family heritage and business that is jealously guarded instead of shared.
Hazel Beck’s Witchlore and Ann Aguirre’s Fix-It Witches have similar witchy elements in that an older generation of witches is doing its damndest to control who gets power in ways that are detrimental to pretty much everyone involved – which is definitely paralleled by the story of What We Sacrifice for Magic.
The third element here – and one that didn’t get quite enough attention for this reader – is that late 1960s setting. The past is another country, they do things differently there, and that feels particularly true of the way things were before all of the social revolutions of the 1960s. The world was changing faster than small towns or formerly dominant institutions were able to keep up with – and Elisabeth’s coming of age felt like it was on the cusp of that but it wasn’t as much as this reader might have liked.
At its heart, this is a story about the family ties that bind and strangle, and the ballast of family expectations that may be great for the town but has turned out to be pretty catastrophic for the women who are supposed to bear its burdens. I felt for Elisabeth’s need to escape, I just found myself wishing that she hadn’t felt the need to take on so much guilt for having done so, and was glad to see the family start to heal when the dark secrets were finally exposed to the light.
