I loved the premise of this book - bada** witches who are revolting against the grind? What's not to love?!

I admit I had high hopes, but it didn't deliver for me. It was good, but not great. The characters weren't my favorites, and they ended up blending together a bit for me.

Overall, the audiobook was done well though and I'd give the author another try.

*Gifted by Tordotcom & Netgalley, but all opinions are my own. Thank you!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me a free advanced copy of this book to read and review.

This is a really interesting novella, with a fascinating premise, and is very well-executed. Combining historical-inspired detail on working conditions and class warfare between factory-workers and rich mill owners with sapphic romance and witchcraft creates a thought-provoking, engaging story that I got through in one sitting. I'll be looking forward to the next work from this author.

The Factory Witches of Lowell by C.S. Malerich is historical fantasy set in nineteenth century Lowell, Massachusetts, which at the time was a factory town full of textile mills. Many of the workers in those mills were young, single women. Mill workers Judith and Hannah are using magic to help them lead a strike for better conditions, using methods that absolutely strengthen the novella’s representations of solidarity, female relationships, and the evils of capitalism. I give bonus points to the author for making sure to show how the textile barons in the north were irredeemably intertwined with enslaving cotton-growers in the south. Here is a post on the author’s blog with a list of some research reading, including the classic The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist.

I felt like this book was designed specifically for me and my childhood obsession with Lowell Mill Girls combined with my love of labor activism, witches, and queer characters. I enjoyed it heartily.

A wonderful mix of historical fiction and fantasy. Malerich weaves together a tale that allows you to want more for the characters and wish you could be right there with them to fight for their cause.

It's officially spooky season, and I, for one, am excited to celebrate the array of witchy books available. For nonfiction history buffs, look no further than Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem (Back Bay Books, $19.99), which offers a comprehensive account of the Salem Witch Trials, starting with the convulsions of one young woman and resulting in the execution of more than a dozen men and women.

Alice Hoffman's Magic Lessons (Simon & Schuster, $17) also transports readers back to 17th-century Salem, offering an expanded history of the Owens family that stars in her popular novel Practical Magic (Berkley, $17) and its more modern-day prequel, The Rules of Magic (Simon & Schuster, $16.99).

Nearby Lowell, Mass., provides the setting for C.S. Malerich's The Factory Witches of Lowell (Tordotcom, $14.99), which imbues women on strike in the small mill town with a bit of strength in witchcraft. Danvers, Mass.--where the accusations originated that kicked off the Salem Witch Trials--also serves as the setting for Quan Barry's excellent We Ride Upon Sticks (Vintage, $16.95), as the 1989 Danvers High School field hockey team taps into darker powers to secure a state championship.

That's not to say New England has the corner on witch trial histories: Rivka Galchen draws on historical accounts from Württemberg, Germany, in Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27), which our reviewer called "a vibrant, provocative story" with a "decidedly modern tone."

Never one to miss a good contemporary romance (or a punny title), I gobbled up Lana Harper's Payback's a Witch (Berkley, $16), a queer revenge-gone-magic tale of a handful of witches out to take down the magical bro who's hurt them each in turn. Here's to the magic of the season!

The premise sounded very intriguing! It was about witches set in the Lowell mills. However, I found the characters to not very likable. I do like that this was a short read instead of a novel because it did not drag as much! I recommend this for those interested in the Lowell mills!

The first chapter is simply magical: a group of girls has decided enough is enough, and so they gather in the attic of their boarding house, cut off locks of their hair, and weave them together into a rough fabric of sorts, all while chanting a spell of solidarity. I was hoping for a story focused more on witchcraft, but those elements turned out to be rather sparse.

The world building in this is an absolute nightmare in the terms of how slavery is handled and the magic. I am really disappointed in Tor with this as I expected better. I live in the area of these mills and its a really interesting history and this was just terrible.

I received a free digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was a difficult read for me. I didn't really connect with the characters at all.

Thank you kindly to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for this review copy.

This was a surprise fly short novel. Novella? About a group of factory workers who use magic to help the unionize for better wages and better working conditions. This was a fun historical fantasy novel, casting light on what it might have been like to be a factory girl working in Lowell not so long ago.

This is a fun concept that I was predisposed to enjoy, because it involves the city where some of my family is from and still lives. I enjoyed reading it, and it's cute enough, but it feels like it's way too short for what it's trying to do. It doesn't have the room to breathe that it needs to make questions of "who's going to betray who" and "what can the magic do and what can't it" actually work. There's the meat of a good story here, and I don't regret reading it, but it feels unfinished.

It definitely suffers for being a novella. It could have been a great fleshed out novel, but there's not enough space for the relationship to grow or for the strike to really happen. I mean, it does happen, but by and large there's little tension or and it all sorta seems inevitable. With so few pages, I think you have to either focus in on the happenings or the relationship, the other takes back seat. Neither winds up being the focus here and both wind up taking the back seat.

The mill girls of Lowell have had enough. Terrible working conditions and no autonomy over their jobs or their lives has led them to incite a strike. They have the fight in them to manifest change, and a little magic won’t hurt their cause, either. The want freedom, better working conditions, and better pay for hard work, and banding together to make this happen will strengthen their sisterhood and bring about real change for women everywhere.

I loved this book. I don’t know why I thought it was super long. It wasn’t. I finished it in an afternoon, and thoroughly enjoyed it. In case you haven’t been keeping up with my reviews, all you have to do to get me to read a book is tell me there are witches, and if you throw the word queer in there, odds are I will love the book. What can I say? I’m a simple gal with simple interests, haha!

This story moves quickly. I love historical fiction stories about women, especially when they aren’t just window dressing on the stories of men. These ladies risk everything in hopes of a better future not only for themselves, but for factory girls everywhere. Men hold all the power, and they need reminding that the only reason they have the power is because they are backed by the work, skills, and knowledge of the women “below” them.

If you’re looking for a quick read that inspires you and instills the feeling of sisterhood, definitely check this one out. It’s available wherever you get books or audiobooks now.

This book is an interesting and unique premise, however I had real difficulties with the framing and some of the views uncritically presented. All the best to the author, thank you for the earc

The Factory Witches of Lowell by C. S. Malerich
Available Now

What happens when you combine corporate greed, misogyny, and young women who have had enough? You get a magical tale of friendship, love, and women embracing their power.
This historical novella takes us to the factories of Lowell, Massachusetts and the harsh working conditions found within. When the factory workers, nearly all young women, discover their pay is going to be cut again, they decide they have only one choice: they must strike. What the factory owners don’t take seriously is the young women have witchcraft on their side and they aren’t afraid to use it.
This story takes off running and never slows down. We are shown the harsh working conditions of the young women and the health complications they all know they will face. Danger from unsafe machinery, lack of ventilation, and lungs filled with fibers are all risks they have to endure in order to earn a living. But for every horror we are shown, we also see all the ways that the women band together to look out for one another. Many of the girls suffer from coughing fits caused by the small bits of lint in their lungs from sucking threads through the shuttle. They are all aware that they will suffer the same fate if changes aren’t made and the deteriorating health of several girls reinforces their need for immediate change. Malerich has created an interesting magic system that the girls use to fight against the oppression of the factory owners and create a stronger bond between the workers. Woven throughout the story is the budding romance between two of the young women and it is really sweet.
The Factory Witches of Lowell explores the horrors of exploitation, the bonds of friendship, and the lengths we will go to for the ones we love.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for the opportunity to read and review this title. All opinions and mistakes are my own.

This is a story about a group of women who grab their own agency, take back their own power and harness their own magic.

And it’s definitely magical.

The “mill girls” of Lowell, their lives and working conditions, make an interesting story to begin with, even before adding in witchcraft.

Not that the real women who worked in the mills weren’t called unnatural, as well as witches and bitches every single time they went on strike, or as it was called then, a “turn out”. Because these women, mostly young, were able to live away from their families, earn their own wages and save their own money by working in the mills.

It was revolutionary.

At the same time, as is detailed in this story, the conditions really were brutal. The work days started early, ended late, the windows were closed winter and summer, the noise was “infernal” and their leisure time was both limited in duration and ringed round with conditions about where they could go, what they could do, how long they could be away.

It was still freedom – of a sort. More freedom than they would have in the homes they came from for many of them.

It was also, as the residents of many a “company town” discovered, a chain that was difficult to break, as the company they worked for controlled the wages they were paid AND the cost of their food and lodging. As this story begins, and as occurred in real history in 1836, the company could squeeze its workers between the rock of their wages and the hard place of their living expenses at any time and seemingly without recourse.

The recourse that the female mill workers in the story take is the same one that the real mill workers took in the fall of 1836. They went on strike.

The striking workers in this story had a weapon that their real-life historical sisters did not. They had witchcraft. They had the power to make their strike into a magically binding pact. And they had the leadership to make that binding so strong that even the mills bent to their will.

Not just figuratively by giving in, but literally. By magic. And by the power of love.

Escape Rating A-:This was lovely and surprisingly charming, even though the conditions under which the “mill girls” worked were anything but.

What made this story “sing” was the way that the magic of witchcraft, which is always considered to be “women’s magic” and therefore “less than”, wraps itself around the bones of the history like the weft of the women’s work wrapped around the warp of the looms.

And then there’s the character of Judith, and her love for Hannah. In a way, everything Judith does is about her love for Hannah. And they weave together as well. Because Judith is the leader and the organizer. She is the driving force behind the strike and the union and the witchcraft. And yet, it’s not her power. Judith has no “craft” of her own. The craft is Hannah’s. It’s only together that they can achieve the impossible, holding the strike – and saving Hannah’s life.

Their love, and their desire to save each other is the grace note that makes this story just rise.

One of the marvelous things about this story is that it is complete in and of itself, in spite of its relatively short length. Not that I wouldn’t love to know about what happened to all of them, particularly Judith and Hannah. But I don’t have to know to feel satisfied. They lived, they loved, and even if they spent the rest of their lives together fighting the long defeat against the powerful mill owners, it’s clear from the end of the story that there will be plenty of joy for them in that fight.

This is a story that doesn’t have a happy ending. Rather, it ends in a kind of “happy for now”. The Factory Girls Union of Lowell really can’t win the long war against the rich and rapacious “gentlemen” who own the mills. But as the story ends, they have won a big victory, and are firmly resolved to continue the fight. As they did.

As unions continue to do to this day. Unfortunately without the witchcraft – as far as we know.

It’s really hard to avoid reading about the conditions that a lot of people are working under today. Before the pandemic it was already questionable, especially with the rise of the gig economy. But the pandemic, particularly in the United States, has brought a lot of those issues into sharp detail. So when I heard of a book about a group of women banding together to strike in the nineteenth century using magic, I was instantly sold. I know it’s not exactly a solution to our current predicaments (I wish it was), but because stories about solidarity are so rare, it’s important to read stories that focus on actually banding together. It’s a nice and (in my opinion) important break from the single good guy/girl protagonist who “wins” through sheer willpower. The Factory Witches of Lowell, by C.S. Malerich, is a book about such solidarity that scratches the surface of labor history in the Northeastern United States. It serves as an interesting exploration of these ideas but falls short in delivering a solid story.

Our story follows the exploits of women workers in the milltown of Lowell, Massachusetts, adding a fantastical flair to real life events of 1836. The two main characters are Judith, the ringleader of the strike, and Hannah, one who still practices the forgotten art of witchcraft. There is a budding romance between the two as they navigate the strike, facing opposition from management and helping to keep the other women involved. Magic isn’t a silver bullet in their schemes, so while Hannah practices, she still has to work to find the right spells to counteract the papercraft of capital. How can a young group of women succeed, when there have been several attempts before them? Will the magic be enough?

Promisingly, the book opens in media res, with the women performing magic during a strike planning session. There is a sense of wonder that fills the pages; the reader is introduced to the characters as they submit their hair to the collective spell. This spell would in essence form a magical bond of solidarity, preventing women from crossing the picket line at the promise of individual benefit from management. What I particularly enjoyed about the magic in Witches is how cleverly Malerich interweaved it into the class politics and machinations of capitalism. Setting Hannah up as someone who understood the basic tenets, but had to use her foundations to analyze and build new spells was really fun, and also fairly informative from a material analysis perspective (if you’re into that sort of thing).

Beyond the magic, however, I had a hard time connecting with the story, and I think that is mostly due to its length. Witches relies a lot on the historical aspect as a given, and people’s common understanding that working conditions in the nineteenth century were awful and extremely exploitative. There are tidbits here and there about the specifics of working conditions such as the kiss of death (in which women had to inhale the string through loops, thus inhaling the linens and dust, developing coughs), but I never got a general sense of their lives. While I understand that there probably was not much of a life outside of work in these conditions, I barely got a sense of who the women wanted to be outside work, or if they even saw the work as important. It was a fairly large cast of characters, centered around two particular women, but overall most of the characters barely had any defining traits even though they were often talked about in reverent and defining ways. I get that there is a very fine line to walk before you stray into anachronism, or modern progressive ideals showing up in historical fiction, but I had a hard time caring about the strike beyond my already pro-labor power tendencies. I’m not saying this had to be a “teachable moment” — it is fiction and deserves to be fun, I just mean that purely from a story standpoint I did not buy in. I think I expected historical fiction with a charming fantasy twist, but I just got the charming fantasy twist with historical labor trivia thrown in.

In the end it’s hard to say how much of this could be made more compelling with length, because I do think that’s my major complaint with the book. Witches is 120 pages, and so much is crammed into it. Everything moves so fast, there’s no time to appreciate the characters or their struggles. The texture of their lives feels missing, and while there are plenty of dissections of the book from a political perspective that are enlightening (if you are interested, I definitely recommend looking into them because there is a lot to learn about), I had trouble with it as a story. I wish it was a little less subtle, and had more “oomph” to the narrative. I still liked it and loved the way Malerich used magic in a grounded way to highlight how capitalism as a system functions. However, I wanted more from it, and maybe that’s a personal problem.

Rating: Factory Witches of Lowell – 6.0/10
-Alex

Historical fantasy set in Lowell, New England where the female mill workers band together to form a Union and demand improved conditions with pay. However they set about their strike through the use of magic, with each woman surrendering hair to be woven to be used in the spell to set the success of their withdrawal of labour.
I enjoyed the premise and was swept along with the story, however the characters were painted with a very light touch so not always fully engaged with their struggle.
This book is worth reading and would look out for any further writing by this author.

The Factory Witches of Lowell is a fictional account of the beginning of the Lowell’s Mill strike, which was organized by the women working in the factories. At first, I was intrigued by the premise and enjoyed meeting the different characters. Hannah and Judith were interesting but I never really felt like I knew them (and even got them confused with other characters at times). Overall, there was very little character development in this story. The magic system wasn’t really that well-developed, it felt like it was just tossed in there to try to add something new to the story. Additionally, I felt incredibly unsatisfied when the story ended because it felt like so much of the story was missing. Overall, I’m not quite sure that I would recommend this one.