Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery

Slewfoot was the perfect book for hiding out in the air-conditioning and reading non-stop. Seriously. It's hot, and I was hooked from the first page.

I loved the premise of the book - In the puritanical era of 1600s (1666 I see what you did there...) New England, what if one of the women accused of witchery is actually what she is accused of being? I loved the morality of the book - Why do people consider one religion true over another? What happens when your belief is challenged, and you are forced to confront what you truly are?

With tertiary characters aside, nearly all the characters experience exposure of their genuine selves and real change. None if it is pretty. Most of it is gruesome and emotionally rending.

For people who are show more deeply bothered by violence to animals (as I generally am) - There is a lot, and it is hard. It's life and death in the wilderness. It's not meaningful or meaningless. Good or evil. It just is.

Except for one:

Booka's death was meaningful to Abitha, and it drove her to action. In the end, Booka was Abitha's familiar and her death was the spell that was needed to utterly destroy Sutton.

My thoughts on the violence toward animals came to a sharp focus at the end/epilogue. Humans are animals and we all gotta eat.

One more thing behind the spoiler:

That revenge was so, so sweet.

I can't comment on the art work because I read it on my ancient Kobo. I'm sure that it's lovely. Eventually I'll get around to ordering the hardback of the book. I've got it on my wishlist now. I'll definitely read more of Brom's books now. This one was fantastic. show less

Maybe it was the teen angst. Maybe it was my allergy to Villains Without Nuance. Maybe I'm just getting old.

I don't like this book much. I should...spooky dos in Puritan times? folk horror? Revenge?! yes please...and I think I might have if I hadn't taken against Abitha so very strongly. Adolescents whose sense of themselves as Right and Hard Done By aren't enjoyable companions for an entire book. I felt Abitha's difficulties with Authority were period appropriate...totally bought that she was justifiably angry with the entire male world...but she comes across as a modern woman. Then when Slewfoot-the-character wins her over with no effort? He's an innocent, albeit one with tremendous Powers, and with...um...horns? Literal goatly horns. show more But Abitha just...accepts. It strained me to buy into that.

I'm not insensitive to the appeal of the Other to those trapped in rigid, conformity-enforcing social milieus. But Abitha's ready acceptance of this, um, extremely Other that resembles the goat we meet her losing...and she even calls him "Samson" after the goat...it didn't scan for me with a seventeenth-century woman. Not even one whose upbringing was as peculiar, her mother a root woman and her father a drunken sot, as hers was.

My most favoritest thing is the animate Forest that Slewfoot (he has other names throughout the story, all of which carry their own shades of meaning and of humor) cohabits with, that has re-summoned Slewfoot from a liminal state to deal with Forest's concerns about its future. (I loved Jesus Thunderbird's name for Slewfoot...Hobomok...as it carried so many levels, from a beautiful butterfly to a scary demon via an early American novel about the Noble Savage slur. A quick trip to the internet will give you literal *hours* of perusing pleasure.) Perhaps the most unsettling of Brom's illustrations is the one he made for Creek:

It's perfect, it's unsettlingly Other, and completely relatably familiar all at the same time. What's missing here is the essence of Creek's Wrongness, Otherness...scale...Creek is tiny and looks like that. Sweet dreams!

These being hallmarks of Brom's works, and the source of my relatively high rating for a book I wasn't all the way in sympathy with, so I was rolling along fine until...the torture porn began. Abitha and her mother, women accused of witchcraft, were in for a bad time. I accepted that. But I was revolted by the deeply prurient recounting of the torments meted out to the women, guilty as charged by the lights of the community they lived in though ambiguously so in modern eyes. They transgressed...they paid dearly for it...
"I want to burn them to the ground, All of them. All of it. Their church, their commandments, their covenants, their riles, edicts, and laws, their fields, their homes, and most of all their fucking bonnets and aprons. I want to hollow them out, make them know what it is to lose everything, everything, to lose their very soul!"

Nothing in this life comes for free...the bigger the ask, the bigger the price. There is more truth than you can fully know in the ancient adage, "Be careful what you wish for lest the answer be Yes." show less

I wasn't expecting this.

Like so many, I was caught quite a while ago by the cover image and the gorgeous interior art of this book. But to be honest, seeing that it takes place 350 years ago, I gave it a pass. Something has to really grab me for me to dive into something historical. It's okay, but it's not something I really love.

But, working in a bookstore, I kinda kept coming back to this book and looking at it. And finally, I had an opportunity to get it at a discounted price so I figured, why not?

So glad I did. I really enjoyed this. If there is anything I didn't quite enjoy about the novel, it was around the the characters of Forest and Sky, etc, constantly pleading with Father. That got a little old, but I do also understand the show more part it played in the overall plot.

But there's a bigger thing that kept going through my mind, especially in the climactic final pages. And that was, "This. THIS is the way you do a new version of CARRIE."

So, here's my thing—and yes, I'm going to take yet another swipe at THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD by Tiffany D. Jackson—which is, we all know there's only a limited number of plots, and I know full well that Stephen King was nowhere near the first to write of a character who's beaten down before unleashing a power they likely shouldn't possess.

But CARRIE is obviously one of the better known ones now. There's an entire generation of people who, when you say that name, immediately picture Sissy Spacek with her crown, and her face covered in pig blood.

There's a right way and a wrong way to take that story and try and make it fresh. Stealing the entire plot, almost beat-for-beat from King, and rewriting it from a POC perspective ain't the way. By all means, DO a retelling, but change it the hell up. This "reimagining" BS ain't the way.

Now, along come Brom with this...and it is a CARRIE story, but it's got some really interesting twists along the way (including a doubling of the CARRIE storyline). But Brom also makes a lot of changes, that both serve the story, while also distancing it from its older sister.

I love what Brom did here. He accomplished a few things.

He gave us a story about female empowerment. He showed us what happens when women are treated like chattel, like possessions. He also manages to paint an interesting—and infuriatingly contemporary—portrait of men who claim to work for god when, in fact, they work and worship the almighty dollar. He got some commentary in there on the true nature of evil...

...and he told a fantastic tale of horror as well.

He got damn near everything right. And he even gave us gorgeous pics to go along with it. show less

This is one of those stories that stay with you. For me, it was a book I had to put down, I couldn't read it all in one sitting. But it's also a book that I'm not going to forget tomorrow either. The characters are vivid and the story is so good. It has you questioning, who truly are the bad guys? The creatures that are supposedly "the devil" or the towns people who kill their own who don't fit into a neat little basket.

Abitha is an amazing main character who you are just rooting for the whole time. She's a kick ass strong female who you want to make it. I was nervous along the way that she wasn't. There were many close calls. And the revenge she got on the town and on William in particular in the end just felt so good.

I read a show more library copy of this book but I have it on my list to purchase. The illustrations only made this better! show less

This book had so many things that i normally love: themes around female autonomy, rejection of Abrahamic hegemony, hella aesthetic, morally gray decision-making, and vengeance. Despite this, I struggled to get through the book , and even considered DNF-ing. Until the final 10% of the book, it felt uninspired to me. I think part of my trouble is that this book was hyped up online. I was primed to expect something eerie and atmospheric but it didn't quite hit the mark.

A wonderful story. It is not rare to find an artist who is an author, or an author who is an artist, but what is rare is to find one who excels at both as if it were second nature. This is very much the case with BROM’s tale of witchery “SLEWFOOT”. The setting of this story is the mid-1600s in the midst of puritan North America. It rolls off the page like the fog in which its characters inhabit.

From the first page the reader can smell this book. From the dead leaves to the oppressive attitudes of the Puritan townsfolk. The characters are somewhat repulsive as can be expected in their attitudes toward Abitha, the main character. She is a strong willed character that will be the first to admit that she does not know when to keep her show more mouth shut. She is not without allies though...however shady and heavy handed they may be. BROM weaves a tight connection between Christianity, Paganism and Native beliefs. He also walks that line between who you can truly call evil or a devil.

The point is if you search for evil hard and long enough, you might just find it staring back at you beneath a full moon. Brom wields his pen like a paint brush. Yes it does help that the artwork in this book is STUNNING. SLEWFOOT is a great fireplace read when the moon is high and the winds are howling. It does help to read this book with an incredible image of Abitha staring you in the face. She is beautiful and enchanting but the story would still be solid if those images were absent. show less

Lo sentí bastante Y.A. por momentos aunque claramente apunta a un público mas adulto. Muy aque típicos todos los personajes. Caricaturezcos en el caso de los habitantes del pueblo mas malvados. La protagonista está muy escrita desde el presente, criticando la epoca en la cual se crio con miradas actuales, remarcandole al lector constantemente cuan retrogrado y arcaico podia llegsr a ser el puritanismo en el cual vive (Ya sabemos). El lore es interesante y tiene un buen ritmo.