Book Review: A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

When a sorceress named Evangeline chooses to move up in Society, she does horrific things. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, Cordelia, decides she will no longer be a part of it. (Spoiler alert!)

It’s been quite a while since I’ve sat down and read a good fantasy book. The reason was burnout from that genre, as well as the fact that I was spending most of my time reading nonfiction to produce articles for this blog.

I’d been struggling to read at my usual pace for weeks, following the death of my grandmother. It was, therefore, a wonderful feeling when I was able to finish not one, but two books this week. One was T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call, a novel that’s been in my Kindle for months. I was glad to finally get to it.

What stood out to me most was not the fantasy in this novel, but the dysfunctional nature of fourteen-year-old Cordelia’s relationship with her mother, Evangeline. In this book, Evangeline is a sorceress accustomed to doing harm to the daughter she claims to love.

The fact is, dysfunctional family dynamics exist today; only the methods of harm are different. There are nonmagical ways to break a child. This is perhaps what struck me most: Even if there hadn’t been magic, this book would’ve been gripping.

However (spoilers begin here), as a fantasy, Evangeline has a specific way of making Cordelia feel not like a human.

She uses magic, when she so desires, to take control of her fourteen-year-old daughter’s body, ‘making her obedient.’ While in this state, Cordelia will walk around in a trance, saying words that aren’t from her mind, doing things she doesn’t want to. It is a horrific violation of one’s privacy, space, person.

A cruel human can do some version of this without magic; it’s a tactic that has been used for centuries. In the real world, it’s achieved through fear and threats. I found myself wondering, while reading A Sorceress Comes to Call, if Cordelia was always being controlled by her mother. How much of it was an instinct to obey, learned behaviors for the sake of survival?

Cordelia’s isolated life results in her having only one friend at the start of the book. Ellen is a neighbor Cordelia visits when she can escape the house on horseback. Ellen shows no obvious signs of suspecting Cordelia’s situation, but some of Cordelia’s behaviors probably raised concern.

Her deep brokenness is displayed in passages like the following:

“Sorry,” said Cordelia gruffly. She wanted to say Please don’t think I’m strange, that was a strange question, I can tell, please don’t stop talking to me, but she knew that would make it all even worse, so she didn’t.

As for her relationship with Evangeline, the following statement sums it up well:

“I made you,” her mother said, looking straight ahead. “I made him and I made you, and you belong to me. Don’t forget it.”

I made you. True as this might be in the sense that a mother is where the child grows and prepares to enter the world, it is not a statement that sounds kind when said like that. I made you in the context that Evangeline uses it, makes Cordelia seem like a puppet who exists only to make Evangeline look normal.

It is little wonder that, when Cordelia is able to go to a different household (a move orchestrated by her mother, who is determined to marry up and achieve a better social status), and when Cordelia meets new friends who treat her well—like a human, rather than a prop—fear of her mother is no longer a motivator to take the abuse.

When Evangeline’s plan to move up in Society leads her to destroy other people, including Ellen’s family, Cordelia decides she can no longer play along. She cannot live as an accomplice to these schemes. For the first time, she finds that it is possible to fight back and not be obedient—and she has a taste of freedom.

As much as Cordelia wishes, deep down, for her mother’s approval—she becomes the most determined person to stop her. She cannot bear any more instances of ‘being made obedient.’ She tastes enough genuine affection to know she deserves better than what she’s been getting.

However, stopping a sorceress such as Evangeline will be difficult. Cordelia cannot do it alone. Thankfully, she has Hester, the elderly sister of a squire Evangeline has set her eyes on. Hester might not have magic of her own, but her personality is more than a match for Evangeline.

Hester had seen her share of artful swoons practiced by artful temptresses. They tended to involve the back of the hand pressed against the forehead, an exclamation—“Oh! I feel faint!”—and then a graceful crumpling to the floor, carefully conducted so as to miss any inconvenient furniture.

The Squire has enough of a position in Society to be a useful stepping-stone on Evangeline’s climb to the top. Hester does not realize, at first, that the woman is a sorceress; she does see that Evangeline is determined to snap up her brother and become mistress of his house. She notices that Cordelia lives in fear of annoying people—another learned behavior from having a mother who’s constantly annoyed with her.

Hester takes a liking to Cordelia. She can see that, whatever evil machinations drive Evangeline (or, as Hester likes to call her, Doom), Cordelia is not to blame. Cordelia is tired, beaten down, and in the habit of trying to disappear. She does not know how to behave around kind people.

Hester is able to adopt her, in a sense, and even answer questions about things like courtship, which Evangeline never bothered to do. Soon, Hester and Cordelia both find themselves scouring a library to find a way to fend off sorcerers who control minds.

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I think this book was perfect for easing back into the fantasy genre after a time away. It isn’t insanely long, and the writing style is not dense. I’ve got nothing against very long books—I’ve enjoyed them in the past—but always have to be in a certain mood to commit to one.

The fact that the main character was broken and human, so it did not feel like a complete fantasy, made it an excellent bridge to cross back into worlds of magic and sorcery.

My only complaint is that the book left quite a few threads hanging. Cordelia knows nothing about her father, whom Evangeline implies abandoned them after the child was born. There is some implication that he died. I’m glad there are unanswered questions because it means there will probably be another book, but I felt that a bit more closure could have been offered, simply so that things would not be so abrupt.

I look forward to reading more about these characters, though, and overall found the ending to be satisfying. In my opinion, the best kind of fantasy is that in which there is enough humanity that the line between fantasy and reality blurs. This makes it all so much more vivid. A Sorceress Comes to Call does this perfectly!

If you’ve been sitting on the fence about this book, I encourage you to read it, for I found it to be a true page-turner.