The Year of the Witching

The Year of the Witching is set in an alternate world where one small location, Bethel, sets itself away from everywhere else. It's obsessed with its religion, which involves two opposing deities: the Father and the Dark Mother. The Father is the sun and all things good, while the Mother is the moon and evil. 

Guess what this means. If you said misogyny, you are correct. 

This is a highly patriarchal society where men take multiple wives, most often vastly younger than they are. The worst offender is the Prophet, the current high priest. He's got to have over a dozen wives. I can't remember if a number is said. The Prophet is gifted with some sort of future Sight and once his heir has his first vision, the current Prophet dies shortly after. His apostles sometimes have also possessed powers, like being able to tell if someone is lying or not. Women occasionally have also had these "gifts." The lead character's grandmother is a midwife and her gift is to know the name the Father wants the child to have. 

Immanuelle is our lead girl. Her mother was the wayward daughter of an apostle. She hooked up with a farm boy from the Outskirts. The Outskirts are where they put a group of outsiders a long time ago and now they're basically stuck living there, even though they've adopted the customs of Bethel. Oh, and they're black while the main Bethelites are white. Yeah, misogyny AND racism. Bethel sucks. So Immanuelle's mom and her farm boy got caught. He got burned on a pyre because the Prophet wanted Immanuelle's mom and he was a jealous prick. After trying to kill the Prophet, Immanuelle's mom ran away into the forbidden Darkwoods, where she met up with the legendary four witches that are daughters of the Dark Mother. She returned a few months later, about to give birth, and her father took her in, even though he'd lose his position in the church for it. She dies after the baby is born but lives long enough to hear her mother (the midwife) name the baby Immanuelle. She's amused by this. 

So Immanuelle is the town outcast because she's the only half-Outsider (AKA: half-black) and her mom was evil. She also likes to read a lot and that's not encouraged for women in patriarchy land. 

There is so much going on in this book. I'm just going to briefly summarize things, I think. 

Immanuelle and her BFF Leah are hanging out after church and have an encounter with Ezra, the Prophet's oldest son, who's like the town catch. Leah is going to be the Prophet's next wife, which Immanuelle is not thrilled about. After a failed trip to the market, Immanuelle's black ram gets away from her and she follows it into the forbidden woods, where she meets two of the four witches. 

Ah, an aside on the witches. Their whole presence is really unexplained, because they were once living women, but this was I believe "centuries" ago and they died in this huge holy war where the patriarchy fought them. Now they're in the forest so they're kinda undead. How they got undead, I don't know if it ever said. Presumably their Dark Mother resurrected them or something. The main one of the four is Lilith, because of course it is. She's very tall and her head is entirely encased in a deer skull with huge antlers. The second one is the sexy one: Delilah, the Witch of the Water. She always comes up out of water. The third and fourth are the Lovers: Jael and Mercy. One is blonde, the other is prettier, taller and black-haired. It was never incredibly clear which is which, but I think the blonde is Mercy and the dark one is Jael. They don't seem to have any distinction other than being lesbians. Their appearances are all beaten, bruised and creepy in general. 

Okay, so Immanuelle gets her mother's diary from Mercy and she's more drawn to the woods than ever. She ends up finding a pond and meeting Delilah, who lures her into it. She just happens to get her first period (at sixteen) and that turns into an inadvertent blood sacrifice because those were done in the Dark Mother's pond. She encounters Lilith, too. 

Then the plagues come. Immanuelle realizes the words her mother wrote over and over at the end of her diary are four plagues: blood, blight, darkness, slaughter. 

Now we've got the quest-type part where and she and Ezra are working to stop the plagues. Immanuelle eventually realizes her mother turned her into sort of a curse. She escapes the town to find her paternal grandmother, who explains that Immanuelle's mom tried to protect her by giving her a lot of power, but the witches twisted that, made the mom go mad, and that's how the curses came about. She tells Immanuelle that she can turn the power of the curses back into herself and control them, so Immanuelle has this big plan to go save Bethel. It gets pretty dramatic, but she pulls it off and hopefully, Bethel will turn into a better place for women, but I dunno. 

All of that is extremely simplified. The book is pretty action-packed and it constantly flows forward. The characters are all decent, both the ones you're supposed to like as well as the obvious bad guys. There's a lot here, but it's mostly good so it's well worth reading. 

As far as the horror element, the witches are creepy, but it's the men of the town who are the true horror. When you've got people that old going after young girls, there's gonna be rape. I'm not going into detail because it's a spoiler but definite pedophilia and rape. 

The main thing that I wanted more of was the witches and the backstory. There are hints that a lot of what happened to the witches and women back in the holy war days was unfair misogyny and the slaughter of women and girls. I wanted to know more about the history and especially more about each of the witches. I think the author deliberately left it out though, because the witches aren't supposed to be the evil that's actually good. No, they're still perfectly happy vengeance killing people. They feel slightly sympathetic but if she'd taken that too far, then maybe the people would have rooted for them too much when it's really both sides who are bad. But I still wanted to know more. They're the only characters that weren't even close to developed. Everyone else was done nicely. 

If you like witches, religious horror, and a setting that feels historical but isn't based in our reality, I'd check this out.