Witches are big right now. It’s a glut of riches, really, across middle grade, YA, and adult fiction – the magic and mayhem coming exactly when we need it most. A majority of these books are by woman and about woman, about the power we can summon as individuals and collectively, about how deeply men fear that power, and the lengths they’ll go to to take it and silence us.

Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches is about the war to take that power back.

In the world Harrow has created, magic has been banished to legends, songs, and stories passed from grandmother to mother to daughter, lost to time and diminished to small, inconsequential tricks. Where once witches were queens, now they are burned if they dare do more than remove a stain from their husband’s shirt or help ease a baby’s entrance into the world.

They’re burned even if they, like the Eastwood sisters – Agnes Amaranth, Beatrice Belladonna, and James Juniper – are defending themselves from an abusive father who’d kill them for the slightest error, the most minute deviation from the norm.

After seven years apart, seven years during which Agnes did her best to blend into the workaday world of New Salem and Beatrice hid away as an archivist in the library, Juniper arrives, fleeing murder charges. Immediately, she creates more chaos by joining the suffragettes and recruiting her sisters to do the same. She’s thrown out of the organization almost immediately, however, when she uses a spell to turn a protest into something more. In the wake of her expulsion, Juniper decides women need more than the vote: they need to reclaim their power, and to do so, they need to recall the words and ways and will of the past.

They need to reclaim their magic.

I haven’t had the opportunity to read Harrow’s last book The Ten Thousand Doors of January yet (the hold list at the library is long, always a good sign), but friends whose opinion I trust where books are concerned have given it rave reviews so I anticipated enjoying and even loving The Once and Future Witches. And I did love it.

What I didn’t expect, however, was to discover in its pages a call to action.

Even as a straight-up fantasy, the novel would have served as a reminder that no one, especially not a queer, Jewish woman (aka me), has the right to sit idly by as someone – anyone – else suffers at the hands of society or the state, or whatever entity looms large over us. By blending elements of history into that fantasy, however, and creating what feels like a parallel dimension not all that different from our own, Harrow drops us into a “could be” rather than an “impossible dream” or “never was.”

The Eastwood’s New Salem is adjacent to our world, rather than through an impenetrable forest or over a giant mountain range. This makes their struggle all the more urgent, all the more real, and their fighting some of the same battles our ancestrixes fought.

The Eastwood sisters also remind us that everyone serves by her own terms and that we all bring different skills to the fight as they embody the Mother, Maiden, and Crone, breathing new life into archetypes that have been done to death in New Age instructional manual and fantasy alike over the last several decades.

Somewhere along the way, though, we forgot that warriors have different skills and that all those skills are needed to win a war. The Once and Future Witches reminds us that some of us will be on the front lines, some of us will be in supporting roles, and some will be researching and planning. And all of those skills are useful and all of them are necessary. We shouldn’t feel guilty about not having some so long as we contribute what we do have and what we are.

It’s also important that Harrow doesn’t shy away from confronting difficult and uncomfortable issues in The Once and Future Witches. The suffragettes are mostly wealthy, white woman who have a low tolerance for women of lower social standing, and they have no tolerance for women of color.

The Sisters of Avalon, with the exception of the more wealthy, disgruntled suffragettes Juniper brings with her, are suspicious of the Daughters of Tituba, a Black sisterhood of witches, who are suspicious of the Sisters of Avalon in turn, and not without good reason. Who, after all, will get the worst of the punishment if the witches are caught?

Although the two groups do work together, and individual members become friends (and more), they continue, for the most part, to keep one another at arm’s length. Is it uncomfortable for the characters to confront the “why” of that separation? It is. For readers? It should be. But we come away with a greater understanding of what we don’t understand or, perhaps more importantly, that which we haven’t considered, which is the first step to shedding ignorance.

The short version? You should absolutely read, cherish, and pass on The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook, 10/13) to someone else once you’ve finished. It’s a gorgeous, rich, deep story. What’s more, you’ll be a better person, and a  better warrior, for having done so.