A review by se_wigget
A Witch in Time by Constance Sayers

3.0

 

I mostly like the author’s writing style. She could use the word “that” much less—something I maybe only noticed because I recently went through one of my manuscripts and deleted my unnecessary use of the word “that.” 

 

The one other problem I had with the writing was that while Juliet was only sixteen and a (married) man in his thirties didn’t hesitate to have sex with her in 1895, the reader doesn’t really see what’s going through Juliet’s head and heart. If you’re going to show a (yuck) relationship like that—a teen and a married man—you’d better make the emotions convincing, for it to be believable. 

Certainly, this book reminded me how little I relate to heterosexuality, but... the relationship between Juliet and Auguste Marchand strikes me as cringey. She’s sixteen and having an affair with a thirty-something artist. Something I came across in this age of #metoo is the word “grooming” to describe a relationship with such a drastic imbalance of power: a young woman who ends up in a relationship with a much older man in her workplace. 

This book also reminds me of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches series, in which the author doesn’t seem to have a problem with pedophilia—also cringey. 

Ephebophile: one who is attracted to 15-16-year-olds. I knew pedophile wasn’t quite right. There's also hebophile, for those attracted to teens up to age 14. It’s really messed up that all these different classifications exist. So... Marchant is an ephebophile. Yet nobody in the book—not even later incarnations of Juliet—seem troubled by this. I particularly wanted the twenty-first century incarnation, Helen, to say or think something about that, and it never happens. 

Also, Juliet’s fiancé is a sociopath and a rapist who needs to be chopped up into bloody little bits and fed to a dragon. 

I wish this book didn’t have so many fucked up relationships. I’m disappointed Clint wasn’t at least thrown in prison for murder. 

 

I love the stuff about art and museums. The National Museum of Women in the Arts is mentioned on page 16! (I have a membership, but I’ve only been there once, because it's on the other side of the country.) 

When the novel reaches 1970, it features a long paragraph about Sandra’s mother... that reminds me of my mother in the 1970s. It mentions ceramic classes and a pair of ceramic cats (p. 303). I still have the ceramic cat duo my mother made. 

In general, the author is far better at describing visual details such as art and décor than describing emotions.