 |
| Don Martin, Verity Vox and the Curse of Foxfire, Page Street YA, 2025. I purchased this book from Amazon with my own money. |
In Martin's story, Verity comes from a line of witches. The ability to use magic runs in families, although it manifests differently in individuals. Some witches are prognosticators who engage in divination, while others are healers. Verity happens to use her voice for her magic, fitting for someone named Verity Vox (from Latin meaning true voice, 161). "She'd always had a way of ordering the world about with her voice . . . . Poems, nursery rhymes, folk songs . . . . There was a power in words . . . . When she sang, she could wield that power like a blacksmith wields a hammer, forcing the uneven edges of the world to re-form themselves according to her will" (9).
Verity is the only witch in this book, so hopefully Martin will expand the range of his witches in future volumes. But here, Verity is portrayed with many of the witch stereotypes. Just a few pages in, Martin addresses his readers, "You've probably figured out by now that Verity is a witch. The black dress. The black cat. The broom" (8) And of course she also wears a pointed hat. Her magic has Harry Potter-eque qualities: she magically animates an entire bakery (8), pulls an entire bedroom set from her hat (49), and conjures a "fabric closet that would provide any types of material in any color and pattern she asked for" (266). While this adds to the fun and fantastic appeal of the story, I felt like it distanced me from the magic.
The story is interspersed with lines of nursery rhymes and folk songs that Verity uses to focus her magic. I looked up the source of each quotation as I read. This is an enjoyable part of the writing. The use of songs and rhymes makes the magic seem authentic and close, something that you could do. It is remarkable to see how many nursery rhymes have a spell-like quality in their repetition and intention. Even simple ones like "Rain, rain go away" (225-26) reveal their magical potential when Verity intones the lines. Earl, the evil wizard who lives on the mountain and has cursed the town, is the first to draw on a Bible verse, using Jeremiah 47:2 "Behold, waters rise up out of the north . . . " to whip up a thunderstorm that floods the entire valley, almost wiping the town from the map. Here is a nod to the severe flooding that punctuates life in the coalfields, and to to Appalachia folk magic, which has traditionally used the Bible as a source of magical language.
 |
| The story of Vulcan, WV's collapsed bridge |
Well, the story is set in Appalachia. Although there is little geographical information in the book, Martin based the isolated town Foxfire on the real Appalachian community of Vulcan, West Virginia, lending an element of first-world reality to the story. Martin describes how the mining town was founded during the boom years of coal in the early twentieth century and fell into quick decline when the coal ran out. As it fell into poverty and disrepair, the only legal road into the town, an old swinging bridge, gave out. After years of neglect by the West Virginia state government, Vulcan's mayor made a desperate appeal to the Soviet Union in 1977 for assistance. Only then did the state of West Virginia finally approve the repair of the bridge, as described in a 1977 article from the New York Times archive. In the story, King Earl's bad deals and double-crossing manipulation stands in for the coal company's bad faith and the government's negligence of ordinary Appalachian people left holding onto their decrepit town.
But the witch in this novel is not Appalachian. She arrives in Foxfire from elsewhere by following a leaf inscribed with the cryptic words "We're cursed. Send help!" Not a particularly positive way to describe Appalachia. The people of the town are helpless, powerless, trapped in a sort of limbo of deprivation since the bridge, the only way in and out of the town was torn down by the evil wizard Earl, who has declared himself King of the mountain, perhaps a subtle reference to King Coal. Every family in Foxfire has made a deal with the King that has cost them dearly, yet he continues to hold the whole town in thrall. Sickness, ugliness, decline, and death prevail. Magic and its promise of salvation must come in from the outside. I found myself thinking that this pattern reinforced rather than challenged the narrative of disenchantment. The novel doubles down on the trope that Appalachia needs help and solutions from experts from the outside to do what Appalachian's cannot ( in this case, witches who automate, build, and repair what Appalachians break).
The finale of the story is not Appalachian. Verity's companion Tacita (from Latin meaning "silence") dreams of escaping the confinement of Appalachian life. She wants only to leave Foxfire and go away with Verity. "If you could get on that broom right now and fly anywhere, where would it be?" she asks Verity. "Just like that? You'd leave all this behind?" Verity responds. And so, they hop on the broom, "the girl and the witch flew off into the horizon, the mountain fading in the distance" (322). Perhaps this dream of being rescued from Appalachia is compelling and something that many young Appalachians experience, especially those who are marginalized because of religion or sexuality as the author suggests in his acknowledgements (323). But this sort of happy-go-lucky agency - getting up and going anywhere you want on a magical flying broom - is not what most Appalachian young people actually experience. The theme works against the re-enchantment of Appalachia, implying to readers that happiness is found by leaving the mountains behind. The magic which came to save Appalachia eventually departs for better places, and the smart ones follow it.
What about the magic? Well, I have mixed thoughts about it.
I appreciated that the magic incorporated English folk songs and King James Bible quotations, which appeals to the Scots-Irish tributary of Appalachian folk magic. There is a cool bit of magic in which Verity uses a candle to transport instantaneously into the woods to catch King Earl by surprise. Martin goes into detail describing Verity's careful preparation for this spell in way that resembles the real practice of contemporary witchcraft (141-58). And there is a beautiful passage that poetically describes the connection between magic and the natural world. During the full moon, Verity goes outside to commune with the landscape, connecting to the world around her as a living entity. "The witch was not alone on that hillside, not really. While her mind expanded outward . . . there was no ignoring the ceaseless thrumming that was the heartbeat of the mountain. Below her, around her, for miles and miles until the horizon swallowed it up, the mountain, also, beckoned" (256) Verity chants "long sorrowful notes" that vibrate with the land and feels the ecosystem around her as if she was a part of it (255-57). This short passage is as close as the book gets to nature religion and green magic. The moment is definitely one of re-enchantment, a lyrical ode to beauty and mystery of the Appalachian landscape.
Despite these amazing highlights, ultimately the magic is not distinctively Appalachian. There is a sort of generic quality to Appalachia here, "Don't look in the trees. Don't go whistling at night . . . There's haints that'll call you out and have you follow them up a holler 'til you can't find your way back" (66-67). These are the sort of Appalachian tropes that populate Tiktok. And occasional generic descriptions of magic, "she carved a number of symbols and circles into various stumps here and there that helped her focus her magic" and "Verity sang words of power" (273) What symbols and what words? I completely understand that a YA book isn't meant to support technical and in-depth descriptions of magic. But this sort of short-cut generic "witchy-ness" just falls short of an immersive and compelling experience of a distinctively Appalachian cultural folk magic.
No comments:
Post a Comment