women can flyMegan Giddings
In the world of Megan Giddings’ second novel, The Women Could Fly, the government requires women to be married by the age of 30. By the age of 28, unmarried women must be registered with the Registry. Those who resist should prepare for future post-cancer complexions. justified? Women can perform witchcraft independently. What in another world might be called miracles are here malevolent oddities. More mundane phenomena are also attributed to women and witchcraft. If your husband cheats on you, the witch made him do it. “Witch” is an adjective, witches are still burned at the stake and women are at risk of corralling.
Josephine “Joe” Thomas begins her novel shortly before turning 28 as she struggles to get over the disappearance of her mother 14 years ago. His witchcraft charges rest on his family. After investigation by the Magic Bureau, suspicions remain. “If your mother was a witch, chances are you’re a witch too.” One day, Joe’s father found an updated copy of his wife’s suicide note. To reclaim his mother’s legacy, Joe must travel to an island in Lake Superior that appears every seven years. His next appearance is in four days, so Joe travels there, wanting to find out what happened to his mother.
What Joe encounters on the island is an illusion of female empowerment and academic and emotional education at the hands of a young woman named Linden whom Joe comes to love. But having solved his mother’s mystery, Joe chooses to return to responsibility in an earthly, persecuting world where magic is the curse word.
For speculative fiction to succeed, the underlying anomaly must be present and felt alive. It’s the substructure, not the scaffolding. But for a good portion of this book, the actual magic wears off. The island part of the book is thrilling, but with Joe returning to his old life, the novel’s world-building speculative elements, like the island itself, retreat into the realms of hearsay and rumor. We are left with gendered McCarthyism.
In a flashback, Joe’s mother tells Joe the story of a witch whose powers brought great benefits to the village she lived in. However, an attempt to help the neighboring villagers leads to catastrophe. . The lesson: “The only safe place for a woman is 100% alone.” Joe has spent much of her life infected with an all-round distrust of that statement, but on the island Her time in is proving how wrong her mother was.
Towards the end of the novel, Joe briefly and tragically reunites with Linden and “felt like all the magic that had been building within me was alive”. Yes, and a metaphor made flesh: women are power, not danger.
Sometimes, the notion of timeliness is like a curtain in a novel, obscuring the work itself, emphasizing or obscuring it. “Timeliness” can imbue a book with greater personal and social resonance, but it can also hollow out a novel and force readers to look at the “problem” rather than the “story.”
After reading “The Women Could Fly” in the shadow of the recent Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, you might be tempted to call the book timely. But the relationship between Joe and her wayward mother at the center of this novel is much closer to being timeless.
Tochi Onibuchi is the creator of Riot Baby and most recently Goliath.
“Women Could Fly” Megan Giddings | | 283 Pages | Amistad | $26.99
