“ At least she didn’t look like an old hag. She was only forty years old though–well, fifty-seven, but what’s seventeen years between friends?”

 

Quick Pitch: 

Get in loser, we’re going to get our magic back.

Our favorite Disney inspired villain’s break out of fairy jail to search out their amulets & regain their power back. Trust them- they are innocent of the of the awful crimes they allegedly did. Besides, life is too short, and they aren’t getting any younger. 

Overall Thoughts: 

This is such a unique niche.

It may attract the female 55+ crowd that loves Disney enough to own yearly passes or everyday items? 

Those who like fanfic vibes that are dialogue heavy? 

If you loved Wicked, and you wanted more about in a totally different world/lens? 

It’s not an overly deep read but it’s pretty fun. 

The Old Crones Club isn’t exactly a fairy tale retelling so much as it’s a fairy tale critique that answers the age-old question: why are the women always the bad guy? It turns out that, of course, they’re not. They’re just women who are too old, or too powerful, or too inconvenient for the men in their lives, who knew exactly how you get rid of an inconvenient old woman–you call her a witch and have some benevolent fairy godmothers come take her away to a facility that reads like a cross between a turn of the century insane asylum and a modern conversion camp, both places where we love to put marginalized people who we’d rather just disappeared. The story here takes a while to get going properly, but once it does it’s a fun romp through the aftermaths of several classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales (and some from elsewhere in Europe as well) that tells us what happened afterwards. The characters we know as witches from those stories are exonerated as we learn their real stories, but the real story is watching their developing relationships with each other as they evade capture and try to overthrow the tyrannical patriarchy and its fairy collaborators. The critique here is multilayered but very blunt; these women are misunderstood or, in most cases, openly lied about in order to further a patriarchal narrative, and the beautiful, sweet fairy godmothers who support the male-led agenda to marginalize them are the real villains. My main critiques of this novel are that it feels more like a collection of several loosely connected short stories than one novel; each witch gets her own section of the book during which she confronts her past, reveals the truth of what she did and what was done to her, and gains some kind of resolution from it. I wish those had been more closely tied together into the larger plot, which often feels like it’s just there to be the backdrop for the women’s individual stories to happen.

The relationships between the witches are the best part, and I particularly enjoyed that they’re not perfect–not perfect victims, not perfect heroes, not perfect villains. They make mistakes, learn from them, and move on to do their best to fix what’s wrong with their world. The writing is very solid and very dialogue-heavy, which won’t be for everyone, though I’m a fan of it, and the characterization comes across through that dialogue, through small movements, through little interactions, far more interestingly than it does in the monologues about their women’s backstories. This is definitely a book for anyone who’s a fan of feminist fairy tale retellings, or who has ever wondered why it is that witches always seem to lurk just on the outside of acceptable femininity.