The Women Could Fly

The Law

In the world of Megan Giddings’s novel, witches are real — and the knowledge that they are real has produced a specific legal response. Women over twenty-eight who are unmarried are subject to state surveillance: monitoring, check-ins, restrictions on travel and association. The logic is that unmarried women are statistically more likely to be witches, and witches are a danger. The law is called the Matrimony Act, and it is presented matter-of-factly, as the backdrop against which daily life continues.

Josephine Thomas is twenty-eight and unmarried. Her deadline approaches. She must either marry — something she doesn’t want — or accept a life under state monitoring, which carries its own penalties and indignities. The choice is not abstract; it is the immediate crisis around which the novel organises itself.

But the novel’s deeper subject is Jo’s mother, who disappeared when Jo was a child. Her mother may have been a witch. Her father has spent Jo’s entire life maintaining that her mother was not a witch, that she simply left — because the alternative, in this world, is a category that carries the full weight of social and legal stigma. Jo’s search for her mother’s story is the novel’s emotional engine, and it runs alongside the question of what Jo will choose to do about her approaching deadline.

The Speculative Premise

Giddings is precise about how her speculative premise is constructed. She is not building a fantasy world with its own internal logic; she is introducing a single fantastical element — the confirmed existence of witches — into a world recognisably continuous with ours, and watching how that element interacts with the social structures that already exist. The Matrimony Act is not a departure from the world we know; it is its extension.

The resonances are intentional and explicit. The history of witch trials — the specific targeting of women who lived outside patriarchal control, the use of accusation as a social weapon against the inconvenient, the legal and religious structures that converted individual women into moral threats — is present in the novel’s premise. So is the contemporary history of laws that subject women’s bodies to state oversight: the same logic of control, updated to different circumstances.

By making witches real in her world, Giddings puts the question directly: what would the law do if the pretext for women’s subordination were actually true? The answer the novel proposes is that the law would do essentially what it has always done, because the pretext was never the actual reason for the subordination.

Jo’s Biracial Identity

The novel’s most carefully handled element is Jo’s biracial identity — Black father, white mother — and the specific way it shapes her experience of everything the novel is about. She is legible as Black in a world where the witch law applies to women generally but interacts with race in ways the novel doesn’t fully specify but consistently implies. Her mother, who was white, inhabited a different relationship to the law than Jo inhabits, and Jo’s search for her mother is complicated by this difference: she cannot simply step into her mother’s experience or assume that what was true for her mother is true for her.

This handling — the refusal to flatten race into either irrelevance or over-determination — is one of The Women Could Fly’s genuine achievements. Jo’s biracial identity produces a specific form of between-ness: she doesn’t fully belong to either of the racial communities she is part of, both of which have their own relationship to the witch law and its history, and she processes this not with complaint but with the specific alertness of someone who has learned to read from multiple positions simultaneously.

The Mother

Josephine’s mother is present throughout the novel in her absence — in Jo’s memories, in her father’s silences, in the stories that don’t quite add up, in the photographs she studies for evidence of something she can’t name. The mystery of whether her mother was a witch is also the mystery of who her mother was, and whether she chose to leave or was taken, and what she might have wanted Jo to know.

Giddings handles this emotional material with restraint — the mother is never sentimentalised, Jo’s grief is never performed, the longing is present in the specific details that Jo returns to rather than in explicit statement. This is the most literary aspect of the novel: the way it renders inner life through precise outer detail rather than direct exposition.

The novel’s late sections, in which Jo travels to an island where the witches who have fled the mainland have gathered, are the most formally imaginative — and the most deliberately ambiguous. What Jo finds there, and what she chooses, is left open in ways that the novel earns: the ambiguity is appropriate to a story about the impossibility of recovering what has been lost and the necessity of deciding what to do with what remains.

The Prose

Giddings’s prose has a quality that her debut novel Lakewood also exhibited: compression and precision in the service of emotional accuracy. Her sentences don’t perform feeling; they locate it in specific sensory and material detail. When the prose is working at its best, it has the quality of poetry — not in the sense of being ornate, but in the sense of doing more work per word than straightforward narration manages.

This quality makes the novel’s 256 pages feel complete rather than brief. The Women Could Fly is not a novel that needed to be longer; it does what it sets out to do in the space it takes, and the density of the prose is part of why.

What the Novel Does

The Women Could Fly uses the witch narrative to do what speculative fiction does best: make visible the structures of a world that are so familiar they have become invisible. The Matrimony Act is a transparent device — its logic is the logic of laws that constrain women’s choices dressed in different language — but the transparency is the point. Giddings wants her readers to see the structure, and by making it strange enough to notice and familiar enough to recognise, she achieves that.

The emotional core — Jo’s search for her mother, her reckoning with what freedom actually requires of her — is what prevents the novel from being merely polemical. The politics are serious and present throughout; the grief is more serious, and it’s the grief that stays.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Speculative feminist fiction that uses its witchcraft premise with genuine precision. Giddings is one of the most interesting voices in contemporary American literary fiction.