James Nicoll Reviews

T. Kingfisher’s 2024 A Sorceress Comes to Call is a stand-alone historical fantasy.

Fourteen-year-old Cordelia is impeccably well-behaved. Not from any particular dedication to conformity. Cordelia’s mother Evangeline is a sorceress of no small power who is in the habit of taking control of Cordelia’s body to enforce proper deportment on her child. Cordelia has spent her life being terrorized by Evangeline.

Now it will be Chatham House’s turn for terror.

Evangeline’s magic cannot affect the passage of time. Thus, while she is still a beauty, she is not the beauty she once was. Her current wealthy benefactor, Edward Parker, believes that he can replace Evangeline with a prettier, younger woman, which he probably can, and that he will survive informing Evangeline of his intentions, which he very much will not.

Having compelled Parker to murder his household, Evangeline searches for her next benefactor. Her candidate: the acceptably wealthy and easily manipulated Squire Samuel Chatham. Samuel has a weakness for a well-turned ankle. Evangeline might not even need magic to land this particular fish.

The flaw in Evangeline’s plan is that having ensconced herself and Cordelia in Chatham House, Evangeline will neither be able to monitor Cordelia around the clock, nor can she keep her daughter isolated from potential allies. It dawns on Cordelia that for the first time in her life, she isn’t alone. Samuel’s formidable sister Hester in particular could be the very person to help Cordelia escape her malevolent mother.

Alternatively, by timidly explaining what her mother is and what her plans are, Cordelia may have doomed her new friends to horrifying deaths.

~oOo~

This is apparently a reworking of a fairy tale about a goose girl. I am not familiar with that story, but I do know that geese are universally feared. At least they are at the University of Waterloo, whose campus is littered with the semi-skeletonized remains of slow-moving undergrads who stumbled over goose nests¹.

This book features a huge, extremely poorly organized library that may or may not contain some texts about magic, texts that are vague enough that doing any magic will be an exercise in trial and error. If Evangeline notices the experiments, failure could mean death². (There is a moral here: every large library should be well organized and equipped with a decent card catalog³. The writing of grimoires is another matter.)

While the position of women in this Regency-esque setting is as lamentable as it was during the actual Regency period, Evangeline’s actions aren’t really a reaction to patriarchy (although setting does shape her schemes). Evangeline is a self-centered sociopath for whom the people around her are all tools to be used or impediments to be murdered. She has not the smallest jot of affection for other people, not even her own daughter, nor any hesitation in dealing harshly with impediments. Evangeline is by far the most monstrous character in a novel that features as a supporting character something that could well be a demon.

Cordelia, however, is an endearing character. That’s perhaps necessary as she is one of the viewpoint characters, as is sensible and resourceful Hester.

Kingfisher is one of those authors who never disappoint me. It’s odd, then, that I haven’t read everything that she’s written. I shall have to address this gap in the future.

A Sorceress Comes to Call is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: UW used to have peacocks, which I assumed were removed because peacock cries sound like someone being murdered. Nope. Something or possibly something ate them. Nobody knows what. The something was not geese, because the geese showed up later.

2: Plan A is to somehow unravel Evangeline’s magic. But there’s another possibility.

It is a bit surprising that nobody has tried the obvious experiment of putting a crossbow bolt through Evangeline’s head. Yes, she’s prudent enough to have wrapped herself in protective magic (at least of the sort that she knows). But her speciality seems to be mental manipulation, It would be hard to mind-control a rapid-approaching projectile.

Now, I know some people would expect that Cordelia would hesitate to kill her mother, if only out of fear of what would follow failure. But it’s not Cordelia who has all the power in the alliance. Cordelia’s allies are older, more ruthless, and without the handicap of decades of conditioning. Surely they would have considered crossbows….

3: I heroically resisted the urge to calculate the size the library in question. Are we talking thousands of books or tens of thousands? I suspect even a country squire couldn’t afford hundreds of thousands of hardcover books.