In my head I'm making connections between the Reactor article How to Uphold the Status Quo: The Problem with Small Town Witch Romances and this book. Now, this book is not a small town witch romance. It's not even a romance. However, it does follow many of the patterns of The Witch Book trend right now: witches are a secret society functioning alongside mundane society, said magical society is made up of women, and there is a serious Evil Magic to be dealt with. It also makes some large deviations. First of all, World War 2 is happening. I honestly thought even more time and attention could have been devoted to the internal politics and tensions of the English academy/coven and their isolationism and resistance to joining the war effort. But that's not the focus of the book! The focus of the book is obtaining a dangerous, potentially world-destroying book before the Nazis do, and in this way it's very...action adventure almost.

Where the connection to the Reactor article comes in is with the specific points that article makes about the whitewashing of history these books tend to do. How could this be relevant, you're thinking, this book is set in Europe during WWII, and the Reactor article is talking about what it suspects is a uniquely American phenomenon. And that's the thing. Despite not even being set in America, this book still talks about questions of Blackness in America, and Black magical traditions in America with more depth than any witchy white woman book I've read set there. One of our side characters is a Black man from New Orleans, raised by a Vudoo practitioner mother (I may be reproducing the spelling from the book wrong, I no longer have my copy to check. If I have a chance to check and correct I will do so.) Here we talk about questions of race, gender, and magic with a depth never explored in other books similar to this one. To be clear, it's still not a ton of depth, this is fundamentally still a book about a white woman. But it is the book wrestling with the corner these books often paint themselves into of "why do only women have magic?" in a way that feels much more expansive and like a breath of fresh air than the usual bioessentialism. Because simply, they don't! Rather, magic is the universe's answer to those underprivileged by society. As someone who tiptoes through these kinds of books waiting for the shoe to drop this felt like I could breathe.

There's also a lot going on, commentary wise, with the villain of this story. Morgan Ryan is not British, but it did feel that she was making A Point about British TERFism with the villain here, a woman who is willing to side with literal Hitler, if it means she and her perceived "sisterhood" get theirs.

All of this is to say. I was satisfied by the politics of this book, in a way I do not usually get to be by this type of witchy fiction. Where I am typically pointedly Looking Away from some nasty stuff or heavy implications that I can't be sure of, there was none of that here.