Adelaide, Eleanor, and Beatrice’s adventures in New York’s Gilded Age reflect the vitality and resilience of this tradition in the face of the skepticism, fear, and outright hostility, which, in the novel, are embodied most conspicuously in the puritanical and sadistic Rev. The rock-thrower is mistaken only in viewing such supernatural activities as evil: McKay’s witches are not Satan’s servants, they are the carriers of special skills and wisdom. They practice magic, and young Beatrice Dunn, who answers their advertisement for an assistant – and thus launches the novel’s plot – communes with spirits. “I don’t know why I even agreed to rent to a pair of petticoats,” says their landlord as he contemplates their front window, shattered by a rock wrapped in a note saying ominously, “I know what you are.” Like those they help, Adelaide and Eleanor suffer from the small-mindedness and violence of that world. Clair, two “strong-minded women” who, we’re rather bluntly told, “refuse to conform to society’s expectations.” They run a tea shop that is a ladylike front for their more subversive business providing tarot readings and herbal remedies for women whose needs (whether for sympathy or abortifacients) are ignored – or worse – by the patriarchal world they live in. It tells the story of Adelaide Thom (who figured, as Moth, in McKay’s previous novel, The Virgin Cure) and Eleanor St. For a novel that purports to be about female rebellion, Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York is uncomfortably twee.
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