Review of The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings

“But I also kept thinking of every man I had ever known. The ones from high school who were now in jail or had DUIs or posted pictures on social media of their assault rifles. The men I would see at campus parties where at least two women would discreetly point to them and say, “Watch your drink when he’s around.” The men who would walk too close behind me when I was going home alone at night, who made me grip my keys in my hand, made me reach in my purse and pretend I had a canister of pepper spray in my palm. None of them had to sacrifice their privacy like this.”

— Megan Giddings

There are some books I had no intention of reading what so ever, simply because I don’t know they exist in the world.

Some of my greatest finds have come from accidently stumbling upon a hidden treasure online because I was Googling weirdly specific things like “1980s Chinese women poets in translation,” but the vast majority of my interesting reads come from just wandering the library.

If you’ve been a regular here on this blog, you’re going to know that I spend a lot of time just wandering my local library. It’s how I find new movies and books. I take great pride in how I find these things.

And that, my friends, is how I ended up coming across The Women Could Fly. I’d never heard of the book or the author, but came across it at the end of a library shelf. It had its own little stand and everything, it was the last copy, and while I felt guilty taking the last one, I did just that.

Sat down and read it over the course of one Saturday as a form of self-care, and while it was one of the first books I in a hot minute I had done that for, I was wishy-washy on this novel. Although I love feminist literature, I’m thinking I’m not the right audience for this kind of book—but that doesn’t mean you are!

Onwards with the review.

In a contemporary world where women are suspected of being witches, one woman looks for her missing mother.

Our protagonist in this one is Josephine (often referred to as Jo), who has some major trauma to bring into this novel. Her mother disappeared when she was a young girl, and there are a lot of rumors circulating about how she might’ve died, or how she might be a witch.

In the world that Josephine lives in, women are constantly targeted for potentially being a witch, which exist in this world. There are strict rules for witches if they choose to live within society, including providing their location at all times and being registered with the government. There’s also a major rule for women: they have to marry by the age of thirty, or risk being accused of associations with witchcraft.

There’s one big problem immediately for Josephine: she’s already twenty-eight. She’s got a fling she’s been seeing, but she has no actual interest in getting married with a man.

This totalitarian state has no tolerance for women like her, so if she doesn’t find a solution soon, she’s going to end up on the government’s bad list. She already is probably watched because of who her mother is, but the story here really starts when she finds out the instructions supposedly left for her mother all those years ago, and ventures out to an abandoned lake.

She makes a voyage across the misty waters, where she finds out that all this time her mother was alive, and that she lived in a witch colony that can only be accessed through certain ways, at certain times, and that Josephine had something that would let her pass through the wards.

Time moves differently on the island, so when she enters it, an entire six months passes that she spends with her mother. There, Josephine becomes more attune with the witches and their methods, kind of making her guilty by association. Despite all the time she ends up spending with her mother, getting soaked by the blood rain that happens on the island, she decides to head home.

Josephine arrives back in the real world and makes herself look as not guilty as possible. Still, she’s taken to a facility where she is potentially accused of being a witch, and is tortured through a variety of methods (one of the most horrific is they pretty much tried to drown her by tying to her a chair and dumping it into a cold lake, then pulling it up to try and get her to talk). Josephine’s father is very disappointed by all of this, as he’s a traditional, standard man in this world, and basically doesn’t talk to her because of it.

In the end, she decides that she needs to marry her fling, who accepts her and everything with open arms, and then they end up moving together.

She kind of needs to do this to escape the suspicion that’s now on her, and while they start to pave a life together, one of the witches from the island comes for a visit. It’s kind of unexpected that she was going to come, especially considering how hard it is to get back on the island if you leave it.

At one point, they mention how it took one person over six months to get back onto the island, so it’s kind of strange as to why she’s there.

Anyways, one of the neighbors spots them doing magic, the woman gets away, but Josephine is caught. Despite the support from her fiance and best friend, who appears throughout the novel as a sidekick of sorts. Jo is slated to be executed because of how she admits to being a witch, and, when she is ready to burn, the magic brings her to fly, leaving the ending implying that she was going survive and go back to the island with her mother.

And that’s the condensed version of the novel!

Overall Thoughts

Lots to unpack with this novel. There are a lot of vague references about how this is unfolding throughout the world, but the only thing we know for certain is that the United States is in an intense patriarchal society. Women are seen as inferior, and the fact of being accused of a witch, or the burnings happen, can happen due to a wide variety of circumstances.

I want to say this is a new allegory, but it isn’t. It’s interesting to have a Black protagonist navigating all of this because it adds a different layer to what’s going on in the novel, and the writing itself is very compelling. I wasn’t in love with this novel though because it hashed out ideas I felt like I was already familiar with, and it felt like something I had read before.

I couldn’t shake that feeling throughout, which is why I’m hesitant about it. But I’m sure it’s someone else’s cup of tea—don’t let my review stop you if you’re interested.

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