A Sorceress Comes to Call
In-between waiting for library holds, I have been reading the works of T. Kingfisher, whose A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking I wrote about recently, and other works I generally find good reads; but A Sorceress Comes to Call was great (enough to be a finalist for the 2024 Best Novel Nebula Awards), and something I think any cis male readers of this recommendation especially should read.
Fourteen-year old Cordelia isn’t allowed to close doors in her house. Her mother discourages friends, and when Cordelia displeases her too much, her mother makes Cordelia obedient by controlling her body, and Cordelia isn’t even aware that sort of thing isn’t normal. Meanwhile, fifty-one year old Hester, a self-described spinster, lives on her wealthy brother’s estate at Chatham House and is highly suspicious of her brother’s new lady houseguest, but sympathetic towards her daughter. Cordelia and Hester come to care for each other, and must work together to prevent (another) catastrophe.
The book is set in a vaguely pre-modern era reminiscent of Victorian England, where there is a sort of “sorcery” people are aware of that is profitably used to con people into buying bad horses or cheat at cards — but that’s about it, and there are wards against those things. Sorcerers controlling people? Phht, as if – that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore, if it ever did. It’s told in Point-of-View sequences from Cordelia and Hester, and has a compact cast of named characters. The book was apparently inspired by The Goose Girl by the Brothers Grimm, including the naming of the horse (Falada).
The reason this book gripped me, and the reason I think you should read it especially if you identify as and were raised as male, is how thoroughly the first half of the story portrays “chatting” as both Cordelia and Hester’s means of gathering information and manipulating the world around them. It struck me as like a card game, and then Hester’s card-sharp friend Imogene was introduced to cement that notion; I mentioned this to my partner (who had recommended I read A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking to our child, and has read most of T. KIngfisher’s work otherwise), she remarked right, that’s how women are even still socialized, where have you been?
This tension of playing-the-game-through-social-discussion that permeates the first half of the book was delicious, however you want to slice the gender analysis, and while you-the-reader know the characters could further their common goals if they trusted each other more readily, the book reminds you of the reasons they don’t. I can’t recall having read anything quite like it, though I’m hoping this is a failure on my part in knowing that such a thing can be amazingly fun to read and/or in seeking such things out.
The other thing that really struck me was how well Cordelia’s narrative describes feeling trapped, distrustful, awkward, and wary of reaching out for help because you’re afraid people would laugh in disbelief. My own experiences did not of course have the associated magical weight but I saw a lot of my younger self in her story, and I would invite a reader of this book to consider there are many mundane ways by which a child might wind up in a similar psychological state as Cordelia; and to further consider that an ability to identify and correct cases like that would be a cornerstone in a just and fair society.
She looks like a horse that’s been beaten so often that it doesn’t know what is expected of it any longer. And who doesn’t expect that to ever change.
Perhaps similarly to A Closed and Common Orbit from Wayfarers, I see a lot of myself in both of the point-of-view characters; Cordelia for reasons mentioned previously and Hester for both her protectiveness, willingness to trust her intuition, and determination to make a difference.
Beyond these personal notes, the book is both gripping and darkly hilarious:
“And promise you’ll kill her. No gallantry, now.”
“Madam.” He frowned at her. “I am a butler. Do you truly believe that I do not know how to dispatch a houseguest if required?”
There’s a great bit on the value of developing one’s style as opposed to inherent beauty or following fashion – something I’ve come around to recently. It was also wonderful to get from Hester a middle-aged woman protagonist and the resulting commentary on the differences in how our society values age in men and women:
“Cordelia and her mother are my brother’s guests,” said Hester, “and Cordelia’s been kind enough to keep an old lady company up here.”
“How good of her. Who’s the old lady, then? I don’t see her.”
Hester made a rude noise. “I’m fifty, you know.”
“Yes, and if you were a man, you’d be considered barely old enough for politics. People would call you ‘that young Hester lad.”
One reviewer describes the novel as one “where women play the parts that men traditionally filled, and men serve as helpmeets, sidekicks, and love interests”, and another says it “refuses to sugarcoat the misogynistic realities that lie at the heart of most of these legends and folk tales we’ve loved for so long.” And my dudes? You need this kind of thing precisely to the degree you think you don’t.
I have two minor gripes about the book:
First, I wanted to know more about the serving staff of Chatham House. The book reinforces constantly the barriers the staff have between Hester and her brother’s guests, but from positions of wealth and its associated power, however reluctant. I would have loved a third point-of-view from Alice (Cordelia’s assigned maid) or really any of the other serving staff, and while I suspect adding a class analysis to this book would have been a bit much, for all the analysis of power related to a woman’s age and social standing, excluding class felt like a gross omission, especially for all roles the serving staff played in the story.
Second, I felt the ending and wrap-up as unsatisfyingly short, similar to other T. Kingfisher books I’ve read but also in the vein of Neal Stephenson; I get that you can’t really wrap up these characters and the events of the book like this in a nice little bow, but it would have been nice to get some follow up on Mr. Parker (an early character who becomes important) and his family, and a short epilogue set some years (or decades) later to show that Cordelia is getting along nicely; but I say this as someone who knows what it’s like to feel trapped by power imbalance and knows you can’t really do enough therapy around that: as a fellow traveller, I want to know that she’s gotten on; that sense of closure is important.
Both of these are minor, however, and I plan to re-read the book at some point. It’s also encouraged me to delve into her horror books, in spite of my general dislike for that genre.