Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Arc Review of Toil and Trouble

Toil and Trouble Edited Jessica Spotswood
and Tess Sharpe

Hardcover405 pages
Published August 28th 2018 
by Harlequin Teen
Grab a copy here:
Amazon
Summary

A young adult fiction anthology of 15 stories featuring contemporary, historical, and futuristic stories featuring witchy heroines who are diverse in race, class, sexuality, religion, geography, and era.

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

Glinda the Good Witch. Elphaba the Wicked Witch. Willow. Sabrina. Gemma Doyle. The Mayfair Witches. Ursula the Sea Witch. Morgan le Fey. The three weird sisters from Macbeth.

History tells us women accused of witchcraft were often outsiders: educated, independent, unmarried, unwilling to fall in line with traditional societal expectations.

Bold. Powerful. Rebellious.

A bruja’s traditional love spell has unexpected results. A witch’s healing hands begin to take life instead of giving it when she ignores her attraction to a fellow witch. In a terrifying future, women are captured by a cabal of men crying witchcraft and the one true witch among them must fight to free them all. In a desolate past, three orphaned sisters prophesize for a murderous king. Somewhere in the present, a teen girl just wants to kiss a boy without causing a hurricane.

From good witches to bad witches, to witches who are a bit of both, this is an anthology of diverse witchy tales from a collection of diverse, feminist authors. The collective strength of women working together—magically or mundanely--has long frightened society, to the point that women’s rights are challenged, legislated against, and denied all over the world. Toil & Trouble delves deep into the truly diverse mythology of witchcraft from many cultures and feminist points of view, to create modern and unique tales of witchery that have yet to be explored.
-Taken from goodreads



Review


*I want to first thank  Net-galley for giving me a copy of this book for an honest review.* 

I really enjoyed all the stories in this anthology. They were all so diverse and interesting, as soon as I read that this would be a witchy read I just had to pick it up. This book contained 15 different diverse stories of depicting the lives of all different kinds of people. There was LGBTQ representation as well as different races Andre classes. I loved how these story showed us not just scary and spooky stories nut it’s zhowed us the history of women empowerment. I hope to read more anthologies just as these. I gave this book four stars mainly for its meaning behind each story. As for each single story I believe I only rated one of the 5 stars. They were all really interesting I wasn’t just having problems connecting with the characters and some of the stories I believe mainly because they’re around 20 to 30 pages each. I felt like they were really well written and very thought out. My main problem was how hard it is to fall into a story within a few pages. For some of them I really wish I had more of it or even a back story into the magic and what led the characters to be in the spot they are in now. 

My all time favorite was the last story Why they watch us burn by Elizabeth May. This one broke my herT in so many ways. It’s  more of a modern story depicting women being called witches for standing up for theme selves. The main character stood up for herself against a man who said he was tempted by her. A lot also has to do with men in church such as the Priest of the church. They accused women of witchcraft sting they’re hand tempted them to sin. This story was powerful at this time to read because of the the contradictions that have been coming out to light with Priest and Popes sexually harassing and raping girls and boys since a young age. I cried at the end of this and I  want so much more of it. I definitely recommend this book mainly for this story here.


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