A Sorceress Comes to Call

A Sorceress Comes to Call, by T. Kingfisher

Emminently readable, fresh while still hitting a lot of classic fairy tale beats. I liked Hester a lot, and loved Penelope especially. You don't often see a trio of heroes that features three women in their fifties, so that was quite neat.

I had a bit of trouble with the depiction of coercive control, which I felt was a bit simplified--my experience of emotional abuse within a family is that children believe in their parents, and cling to them, no matter what the parent does. Like, what I've seen is that non-physical abuse actually makes it more difficult to separate from a parent, not easier. But I suppose that isn't always true for everyone.

When I was, oh, probably thirteen or so, I read Robin McKinley's Deerskin, which is a spiritual predecessor to A Sorceress Comes to Call: a fairy tale retelling that finds within the classic tale a story of intensely fucked up domestic abuse. Deerskin distressed me, deeply, and I've hesitated to recommend it to people without huge caveats: miscarriage, incest, a terrible father, the worst kind of vulnerability, the gut-wound terror of facing the person who hurt you. This book is not that, which is maybe part of what struck me with so much strangeness. Because it should feel like that, even if the mechanics of the story are different. When someone shoves you into a doorframe in your own home, it feels just as weird and dislocating and dangerous as 'worse' kinds of abuse, because it's happening where you should be safe, and you don't know if you'll be supported if you defend yourself, and you trusted them, right up to that second.

A Sorceress Comes to Call isn't that intense, though. I felt disturbed by the domestic abuse/coercive control elements, but not to that level. It's a bit weird to review a book when the whole thing just had me feeling a kind of mild disturbance throughout due to things entirely unrelated to the book. This is a good book! I myself wouldn't read it again, but I like Kingfisher's work and will almost certainly read more of it. And I can definitely say that it entertained me while I did chores and sewed and so on--I listened to it on audiobook, and the audio is well done.

Content warning, though, for emotional abuse, verbal abuse, coercive control of a child by a parent