Review: A Sorceress Comes to Call

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I will read just about anything Kingfisher (also known as Ursula Vernon) writes, but I have to say this is one of her better efforts. I do wish a content warning had been placed at the beginning of the book, however, as she tackles some dark, heavy subjects (including parental physical/mental abuse and torture). This is an (apparently rather loose) adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "The Goose Girl," but knowing this author, she has turned it inside out and made it her own. Including a real, honest-to-goodness sorceress: not the weak sort that cheats at cards, but the powerful sort that can take over people's bodies and manipulate them like puppets, and who can drag some skittering, eight-legged, many-eyed thing from some Lovecraftian hell-dimension and cloak it in the seeming of a horse.

(Which makes for some extremely unsettling, nightmarish images when the "horse" Falada is finally revealed, let me tell you.)

The sorceress in question is Evangeline, who in this secondary-world version of English 19th-century society (where women's only prospects were to marry, serve as governesses, or prostitute themselves) has been supporting herself and her daughter Cordelia by being a rich man's mistress for many years. Only thing is, her "benefactor" has abruptly cut Evangeline loose, and after extracting her revenge by taking him over and forcing him to chop up nearly his entire family with an axe, Evangeline sets her sights on Squire Samuel Chatham. She uses a ruse to ingratiate herself and Cordelia into the Squire's household, and sets about slowly spinning her deadly web.

This is the story of Cordelia and the squire's sister Hester (a delightful co-protagonist: Hester is fifty-one and has a bad knee, and is the epitome of the ordinary, sensible, pragmatic characters Kingfisher likes to write), working to stop Evangeline and Falada. At the beginning, Cordelia is such a frightened, beaten down character you wonder if she will ever be able to come out of it, but she slowly starts to break free from her mother's abuse and stand up for herself. She has considerable help along the way, from Hester, as well as Hester's friends Imogene and Penelope and Hester's ex-lover Richard. All three are fellow older protagonists, and it's great to see. What is marvelous about these characters is that they know virtually nothing about sorcery: to stop Evangeline, they have to research and experiment and muddle through and make mistakes that almost result in disaster, but they keep plugging away and helping one another until they triumph.

The only (slight) knock I have on this story is that Evangeline is more or less One-Note Evil. There is some handwaving about Cordelia's father abandoning Evangeline when she was pregnant, and setting her on the path to using her sorcerous powers to ensnare and manipulate men, but there's not enough of a backstory to really make much difference. I did wish Evangeline could have been as rounded a character as everyone else (even the pseudo-"horse" Falada has a bit more nuance than his master), but I guess the author felt that with Evangeline blithely torturing her daughter, there was no chance at redemption.

At any rate, this is a fast, disturbing read that will make you side-eye white horses for some time to come. It's not as creepy as some of the author's previous books (especially The Twisted Ones ), but it's a fine, horrific spin on a gothic and/or Regency romance.

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