Toil and Trouble – Anthology

A young adult fiction anthology of 15 stories featuring contemporary, historical, and futuristic stories featuring witchy heroines who are diverse in race, class, sexuality, religion, geography, and era.

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

Glinda the Good Witch. Elphaba the Wicked Witch. Willow. Sabrina. Gemma Doyle. The Mayfair Witches. Ursula the Sea Witch. Morgan le Fey. The three weird sisters from Macbeth.

History tells us women accused of witchcraft were often outsiders: educated, independent, unmarried, unwilling to fall in line with traditional societal expectations.

Bold. Powerful. Rebellious.

A bruja’s traditional love spell has unexpected results. A witch’s healing hands begin to take life instead of giving it when she ignores her attraction to a fellow witch. In a terrifying future, women are captured by a cabal of men crying witchcraft and the one true witch among them must fight to free them all. In a desolate past, three orphaned sisters prophesize for a murderous king. Somewhere in the present, a teen girl just wants to kiss a boy without causing a hurricane.

From good witches to bad witches, to witches who are a bit of both, this is an anthology of diverse witchy tales from a collection of diverse, feminist authors. The collective strength of women working together—magically or mundanely–has long frightened society, to the point that women’s rights are challenged, legislated against, and denied all over the world. Toil & Trouble delves deep into the truly diverse mythology of witchcraft from many cultures and feminist points of view, to create modern and unique tales of witchery that have yet to be explored.

I want to begin by mentioning I often avoid anthologies. I do so simply because the different authors can have such different styles and the stories do not always flow well. I did see some of that here. I had a difficult time transitioning from certain stories at times. I also dislike anthologies because I am always so unsure of how I should rate them. Do I take the time to sit and take notes on each story and review each individually? Normally, yes I would if I was intending on reviewing it. This time though, I decided against it. I have too much going on and it was just too inconvenient to do. That being said, my rating and review are based on the book as a whole. And in doing so, this will not be a lengthy review.

I don’t have too much to say about the cover here. I enjoy how this cover depicts so many images associated with witches. The cover is colorful, but not overpoweringly so. It did catch my eye, so mission accomplished there!

Now for the stories…I always mention that I love seeing diversity, well this book is full of it. We encounter gay witches, witches that are people of color, and even young witches. The women shown here did not follow society’s norms. They are not married, educated, stay at home moms. They are strong and independent women. I simply cannot express how happy I am with the immense amount of diversity in here. So many people need representation in literature and are finally getting it.

 As I anticipated, there were some I really enjoyed and some that were meh…or I disliked. I mean, we can’t all win, right? I wish I had taken notes while reading so that I was able to give more detail about what I did and did not like, but with so much going on in life right now, I was unable to. I have to read where I can…not always able to take down notes. I did love some of these stories. I flew through them, wanting more. Some could even be expanded on, making a second short story or an entire novel. Others I longed to be over, slowly making my way through the pages and hoping to stay awake.

With that in mind…this book does have a little something for everyone! I admit there were a few I wanted to skim past, but I have such a hard time doing it. I feel like I need to give each book a real chance. Personally, there were not enough stories I enjoyed for me to purchase this upon its release in August.