The Once and Future Witches Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A furious, gorgeous historical fantasy about three witch sisters and the suffrage fight, with a tender sapphic subplot — undercut by a baggy middle and a romance that stays firmly in the background.

Best for: Readers who want witches, sisterhood and feminist fury more than a romance arc, and who are happy to trade a closed-door love story for 500-plus pages of atmosphere.

Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — behind closed doors)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.9/5 — a 4.02 Goodreads average across 114,732 ratings, trimmed for length and for how little of it is romance)

Tropes: Witches, estranged sisters, found family, secret sapphic courtship, interracial romance, suffragettes, alternate history, fairy-tale magic, multiple POV, women reclaiming power.

The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow is a 2020 standalone from Redhook, a historical fantasy set in an alternate 1893 where witchcraft has been burned down to nursery rhymes — and where the three estranged Eastwood sisters, Juniper, Agnes and Bella, collide with each other, with the suffragists of New Salem, and with a city that would rather see women hanged than voting.

It carries a 4.02 average across 114,732 Goodreads ratings, starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal, and the 2021 British Fantasy Award for best fantasy novel. It is also a book that many sapphic readers pick up for Bella and Cleopatra Quinn and then discover is about something much bigger. Both of those facts are worth understanding before you start.

What Is The Once and Future Witches About?

The Once and Future Witches is historical fantasy first, feminist political novel second and romance a distant third. The setting is an America that remembers Salem differently: Old Salem burned with its witches inside, and New Salem is a factory city of mills, churches and respectable ladies who keep only the tidiest charms. Witchcraft here is women’s knowledge, and who gets to hold it maps directly onto who gets to vote.

James Juniper arrives with nothing but a staff, a secret and a grudge; Agnes Amaranth has buried her magic under mill work; Beatrice Belladonna hides in a college library, keeping her books and her heart closed. None of them has spoken to the others in years. The novel rotates close third-person between the three sisters, which gives each her own grievance and lets the reader see the family’s old wound from every side before anyone is ready to talk about it.

What Makes This Sapphic Historical Fantasy Work

The prose: Harrow’s lyrical, rhythmic writing is the most-praised element across Goodreads, and both Booklist and Library Journal flag it in starred reviews.
Magic made of nursery rhymes: Spells hide inside the rhymes grandmothers teach children, and each chapter opens with one. Readers consistently name it as the book’s signature idea.
Sisterhood as the real love story: The estrangement and slow repair between Juniper, Agnes and Bella is where most readers invest, and StoryGraph readers overwhelmingly report strong character development.
Bella and Quinn: The forbidden courtship between a white librarian and a Black writer in 1893 is, in The Lesbian Review’s reading, a sweet undercurrent that grows under real danger.
A cast that widens the story: Readers praise the Black, queer and working-class women who push the suffrage plot beyond a single kind of heroine — and a smaller group argue it does not go far enough.

Book Synopsis

It is the spring of 1893, and Juniper Eastwood steps off a train in New Salem with a limp, a walking staff and nowhere to sleep. She has left the family farm behind for reasons she would prefer nobody ask about. The city she walks into is loud, sooty and full of women demanding the vote — and none of them believes in witches any more.

Her older sisters are already there. Agnes works long shifts in a textile mill and has built a small, careful life that does not include Juniper. Bella catalogues books in a college library and has become very good at being quiet. The three of them parted badly years ago, and the reunion is not warm. Then, at a suffrage rally, the sisters speak a set of old words together, and something that should not exist answers them: a sign that the lost ways of witching are not as lost as everyone thought.

Juniper wants to use it. She wants a witch’s movement to sit alongside the women’s movement, and she wants it now. Agnes wants to protect what little she has. Bella wants to find out what the words really are — and a sharp, curious writer named Cleopatra Quinn wants to help her, in ways that could get both of them arrested. Meanwhile the city’s powerful men have noticed that the witches are back, and a political campaign against them is gathering heat, in more than one sense. The question is whether three sisters who cannot stand to be in a room together can learn to share a circle before New Salem decides how to deal with its witches.

My Review

The idea at the centre of this book is superb, and Harrow executes it with total conviction. Tying witchcraft to the suffrage movement, and hiding spells in nursery rhymes, turns the whole book into an argument about which stories women are allowed to keep. It is angry, deliberate and beautifully built.

The sisters are the other great pleasure. Juniper is reckless and furious, Agnes is guarded and practical, Bella is timid until she is not, and the multiple POV lets you watch each of them misread the others. The repair between them is where the book’s real emotional weight sits, and it lands. Bella’s scenes with Quinn are the warmest in the novel — a courtship conducted in libraries and letters with a price attached to every glance, and it is quietly lovely.

Where it struggles is length, and that is not a personal quibble — it is the most repeated complaint in the reviews. The hardcover runs 517 pages, and readers repeatedly say the middle drags. Around that sit the secondary complaints: a hyphen-heavy, ornate style that some readers find overwritten in the early chapters, sisters who occasionally function more as maiden, mother and crone than as people, and feminist messaging that a vocal minority call heavy-handed. A smaller group of reviewers argue the book’s handling of race inside the suffrage movement, and of a trans side character who exists largely to suffer, does not match its ambitions.

One expectation to reset, and it matters on this site in particular: this is not a romance. Bella and Quinn are a subplot, several reviewers found them underdeveloped, and the heat is behind closed doors. If a sapphic love story is what drew you, calibrate — you will get a lovely one in the margins of a much larger book. If you were worried the witches would be background to a romance, relax; it is the other way round.

My honest note: A furious, gorgeous book with a romance in its margins and a middle that needed cutting. If you want a sapphic love story at the centre, look elsewhere. If you want witches, sisters and women taking power back, with a tender queer thread running through it, this is worth every page.

Element	In The Once and Future Witches
Central relationship	Beatrice Belladonna Eastwood & Cleopatra Quinn — shy librarian and bold writer, a secret sapphic courtship (subplot)
Core tropes	Witches, estranged sisters, found family, forbidden love, suffragettes, alternate history, fairy-tale magic
Setting	New Salem, 1893 — an alternate-history American mill city where witchcraft has been burned out of memory
Heat level	2/5 — behind closed doors
Series	Standalone — complete story, no sequel
Content notes	Misogyny, fire and burning, violence and torture, child and domestic abuse, death of a parent, racism, homophobia and lesbophobia, religious bigotry, pregnancy, forced institutionalisation, police brutality, suicide

How Spicy Is The Once and Future Witches?

A 2/5. romance.io gives it a steam level of 2 of 5, labelled “behind closed doors,” and The Lesbian Review files it under no spice at all. That matches what readers report: Bella and Quinn’s relationship is tender, charged and clearly physical, but the book closes the door rather than showing it.

What is worth flagging in advance is darkness rather than spice. StoryGraph readers log a long list of graphic warnings — misogyny, fire injury, torture, child abuse and forced institutionalisation among the most-cited — and the villains are genuinely cruel. If you want similar low heat in a big fantasy, The Priory of the Orange Tree and Our Wives Under the Sea sit in the same band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you love witches and fairy-tale magic, you want sisterhood and feminist fury at the centre, you enjoy lush, lyrical prose, and you are happy with a sapphic romance as a meaningful subplot.

You may want to skip it if: you only read for a romance arc, ornate prose wears you out quickly, you have limited patience for a 500-page book with a slow middle, or on-page abuse, burning and persecution are hard limits.

In short: a stunning witch novel with a love story in it, not a love story with witches.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

Six years on, this is a backlist title that keeps finding readers every autumn. The #theonceandfuturewitches tag on TikTok shows roughly 403,000 views, and the activity is organic: creators recommending it as a spooky-season read, book clubs running day-by-day readalongs, and the occasional honest “this one wasn’t for me.” The Kindle edition currently sits at number one in Amazon’s Alternative History category. The trade record is unusually strong for anything on this site: starred reviews from Booklist and Library Journal, a positive Publishers Weekly notice, a 2021 British Fantasy Award win, and a fifth-place finish in the Locus Awards. One caution for anyone reading the Amazon page: the Kirkus quote there is praise for Harrow’s earlier novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, not this one. I could not check Reddit from here, so I have not counted discussion there.

The audiobook is part of that long tail. The Hachette Audio edition, narrated by Gabra Zackman, runs 16 hours and 3 minutes and was released the same day as the hardcover.

Prefer audio? Listen to The Once and Future Witches on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The prose, first and most consistently — “lyrical” is the recurring word, and both starred trade reviews land on it too. Then the magic system built from nursery rhymes and folk sayings, which readers treat as the book’s signature idea. The sisterhood is the emotional hook; readers invest in the Eastwoods’ estrangement and repair more than in anything else. The inclusive cast, including Quinn and other Black, queer and working-class women, draws steady praise, and several readers single out Bella and Quinn as a favourite thread even while conceding it is a small one.

What readers argue about and complain about: Length, above everything. Reviewers repeatedly say the book is longer than it needs to be and the middle drags while the sisters are apart. The prose is the second theme, and here readers genuinely split: the same writing most people call lyrical, a minority call purple, singling out chains of hyphenated adjectives in the opening chapters. Third: characterisation, with several reviewers finding the sisters closer to archetypes than people. Beyond that, recurring notes that the feminism is hammered rather than dramatised, that the romances — Bella and Quinn, and Agnes’s with a man — are underdeveloped, and a smaller but pointed critique that the book’s treatment of racism in the suffrage movement, and of a trans side character, falls short of its intentions. The Goodreads rating spread is tight all the same: only about 5% of ratings are one or two stars.

The standalone question worth asking first: it is a complete standalone. There is no sequel and none is needed; the story resolves within the book. Where to go next in Harrow’s catalogue depends on what hooked you. The Ten Thousand Doors of January, her debut, sits at a near-identical 4.01 across about 179,000 Goodreads ratings and shares the lush prose and the slow first half, but it is not a sapphic book.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Once and Future Witches a romance?

Not primarily. It is a historical fantasy about three sisters and the women’s suffrage movement, and the sapphic relationship between Bella Eastwood and Cleopatra Quinn is a meaningful subplot rather than the main plot. Readers who come for the sisters tend to be happier than readers who come for the romance.

How spicy is The Once and Future Witches?

A 2/5. romance.io rates it 2 of 5, behind closed doors, and The Lesbian Review files it under no spice. The intimacy between Bella and Quinn is tender and implied rather than explicit.

Is The Once and Future Witches a standalone?

Yes. It is a complete standalone novel with no sequel, and the story resolves within the one book. Harrow’s other novels are unrelated stories.

Is there an audiobook of The Once and Future Witches?

Yes. The Hachette Audio edition is narrated by Gabra Zackman and runs 16 hours and 3 minutes. It was released alongside the hardcover on 13 October 2020.

How long is The Once and Future Witches?

Long. Goodreads lists the hardcover at 517 pages and the Kindle edition runs 545, and length is one of the most common complaints in the reviews, usually aimed at a slow middle section.

What content warnings does The Once and Future Witches have?

Quite a few. StoryGraph readers most often flag misogyny, fire and burning, pregnancy, death, violence, torture, child abuse, racism, homophobia and forced institutionalisation. It is darker than its fairy-tale framing suggests.

If You Loved The Once and Future Witches, Read These Next

If the witchcraft is the draw, The Honey Witch puts a sapphic romance at the centre instead of the margins, with more heat and a cosier register. If it was the Victorian-era world of women confined and disbelieved, Affinity is Sarah Waters’ darker, stranger take on spiritualism, prisons and longing. And for another big, women-led fantasy in which power itself is the fight, The Jasmine Throne runs a slow-burn sapphic thread through an epic plot.

For more in this register, browse our best sapphic fantasy books list, the lesbian historical fiction guide, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

The Once and Future Witches is a book with enormous ambition and the craft to back most of it. The alternate New Salem is vivid and frightening, the nursery-rhyme magic is a genuinely original idea, and the three sisters give the book a real emotional spine. It is also long, sometimes overwritten, and more interested in its argument than in its love story. Whether that trade works for you depends on why you are here: for readers who want witches and sisterhood with a tender sapphic thread, it is one of the best of its kind; for readers who want the romance at the centre, it will feel like a supporting act. Check The Once and Future Witches on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Once and Future Witches ranks as an award-winning feminist historical fantasy with a sapphic subplot — lyrical and genuinely furious, held back by length, and best approached for the sisters and the witchcraft rather than the romance.