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laurareads87 's review for:
Utopian Witch: Solarpunk Magick to Fight Climate Change and Save the World
by Justine Norton-Kertson
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
I picked up this book with some previous engagement with solarpunk fiction and having read the author’s work in a short story anthology or two. I’m always keen to pick up a book on magic / Paganism / craft practice that has an explicitly social justice angle as I want to have books like this to recommend to others when they ask.
What I liked: Norton-Kertson has written a book that would work for a witch new to solarpunk OR for a solarpunk enthusiast new to witchcraft; the fact that they’ve done both here is, I think, impressive. They provide clear definitions and lots of supplemental reading suggestions. It is definitely a beginner-leaning text but I have some familiarity with both topics and still found interesting ideas to consider. I am grateful to Norton-Kertson for situating themselves in terms of their identities, cosmologies, and traditions, and for solidly taking an antifascist, anti-oppressive position throughout, making a number of good points with respect to how this kind of position can intersect with solarpunk + magical practice. I never thought I’d get to see the phrase ‘diversity of tactics’ in a craft book and so I’m grateful for that inclusion even if I might’ve said something different about it. I think the author strikes a good balance between openness (ie. ‘do what works for you’) and instruction. I appreciate Norton-Kertson’s emphasis on doing tangible non-magical work – picking up trash, engaging in protest, supporting social justice organizations – as vital to creating change. I also like their emphasis on ethically sourcing ritual tools. They include a lot of great citations and links to relevant sources, and they also include a resource list encompassing witchcraft, solarpunk, and social justice texts.
What didn’t really work for me: There was a throwaway sentence early on asserting that “most witches and magickal practitioners believe” they are “bound by the Law of Threefold Return;” I do not for one second think that this claim about “most” can be supported with evidence, and I don’t think it’s needed in order for the author to state what their own ethics are. This feels like a bit of a slip-up considering the relatively consistently solid citation of sources otherwise. There are a few places where lists like “Pagan, New Age, and witchcraft” seem to conflate things that can, in practice, be quite different in ways that are meaningful. One spell suggests using a fire pit and lighting a small fire in the context of working against forest fires – where I live that’d be unlawful (we tend to be under fire bans if wildfires are a concern) and I do question how advisable it is to have any fire outside during an active fire season. Finally, this is a personal gripe, but I really wish that social justice conscious craft books would stop spelling magic with a ‘k’ given that the author who is the source of that spelling was decidedly neither feminist nor anti-racist (indeed, he was quite the opposite).