its_eel's reviews
75 reviews

I got stuck reading this about halfway through. The book started really strong and was leaning towards being fast-paced until the second main part. I can’t tell if my reading was a bit off this month or it was the book, but once I got about halfway through the book, I flew through it. This book almost made 5 stars, but given that I put it down for a good several days, that goes to 4 stars for me.

The urban environment was a full on character in this novel. I loved the atmosphere of Victorian London and the world building was really excellent in this. I could fully envision each of the many settings in this novel. There was a surprising amount of well-roundedness and depth to all of the characters, and given how many there were, I’m impressed that no character felt superfluous.

I definitely felt like some of the dialogue lines and settings were little easter eggs from other fantasy classics, ie Lord of the Rings, The Earthsea Chronicles, etc. 

It may be awhile until I pick up the second book, but I definitely am hooked on this cast of characters and seeing how the story progresses in the next one!

The poems are pretty well-crafted, lighthearted, fun. I generally love most things cat related and Edward Gorey’s illustrations are great. Not a fan of the racism though. There are too many racial slurs in a book supposedly just about cats. 

DNF'ing so I can start reading Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. 

This is my third or fourth attempt over the past couple of years to get through a title in Oxford's A Very Short Introduction series and I don't think I'll be making another after this frustrating book. 

I stopped reading this book about halfway through because the book is just not what it says its about. 

The title is Witchcraft (in hindsight, I don't know why I thought some guy named Michael who pretty much only exclusively referenced Oxford scholars was going to illuminate me with some radical interpretation of historical practices of witchcraft...) and I think a more apt title for this would be "A Very Short Introduction to European Witchhunts in Medieval Europe". 

This text also doesn't hide that it is very Eurocentric. This is not a world overview of witchcraft by any means. Other examples of witchcraft from other cultures probably amount to less than ten sentences overall in this book, if that. 

The author seems to be more concerned with making sure that readers walk away from the book knowing more about various Medieval legal systems and that the witch hunts weren't as "bad" as us contemporary readers think it was. Gaskill says that many texts are apparently wrong in the figures of how widespread the witch hunts and executions were, but doesn't say exactly how those previous figures are wrong. 

There's a weird angle to this book that I picked up on as the author mentioned several case examples where men also were tried as witches and this should prove that the witchhunts weren't inherently based in misogyny (and transmisogyny, transphobia, ableism, etc...). This reads as a bad faith argument by Gaskill, as he rarely speaks on how the witchhunts were integrally tied to these discriminatory social currents instigated by the church and state to assume power and control over women's bodies and reproductive rights through erasure, censorship, and capital punishment over centuries. But yeah, go off Gaskill, I'm sure it wasn't that bad to be a woman and live at a time where you could get executed for knowing how to successfully use certain plants as effective birth control.