Fair warning: The
Sparrow Sisters isn’t really a fantasy story in the expected sense. In
fact, you could argue it’s not fantasy at all because we’re never sure if magic
is present. Just about all the characters dismiss the notion that there’s magic
at work. I wouldn’t even feel comfortable putting this novel in the magical
realism category. And yet there’s
enough uncertainty and peculiarity to be outside the usual bounds of the “real
world” that I decided this book deserved to be discussed on my blog. Plus, it’s
my blog and I can break my own rules, so there.
An argument can be made that there are moments of “hyper”
reality—that is, there are incidents involving our heroines that don’t quite
fit into what most people would consider typical or ordinary. All this
ambiguity is steeped in the historical component of the story’s world. The
titular Sparrow sisters, three grown single women who live in Granite Point, a
tight-knit New England town, are descended from a Puritan-era healer who ended
up on trial as a witch. The sisters themselves claim that such an ability
derives from both natural (non-magical) talent and a thorough knowledge of
herbal remedies. But one sister stands out as especially endowed, and as expected she ends up in the center of the inevitable storm.
