Buzzword Feminism and a Legacy of White Saviours: An In-Depth Review of “Spells Trouble”
I didn’t originally intend to read this book. But when it became available digitally through my library, I decided, “Why not?”
This might confuse anyone who has read my essays on the House of Night or any of my other reviews/analyses of P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast’s work. And I’ll be honest: I went into this expecting not to enjoy it. I also went into it expecting that the reviews I had already read definitely hadn’t covering all the problematic aspects of this book, because they never do with the Casts’ work.
Unfortunately, I was right on both counts.
SPOILER WARNINGS for discussions going forward.
What I enjoyed
Let’s start with the shortest and easiest section, shall we?
First, I liked the core premise. Trees acting as gates to different realms, with the health of the tree representing the strength of the gate? That’s legitimately a cool idea, and one you could have a lot of fun exploring. I also like the concept of different types of witches using different kinds of magic.
Another concept I enjoyed was a familiar such as a cat turning into a human to provide guidance in a time of need. They’re just familiar enough (no pun intended) with the human world to interact effectively with it, while still being alien and a bit off-putting.
Lastly, much of the confrontation in chapter thirty-one was decently written and carried genuine tension. Not all of it, but a good chunk.
Aaand that’s it. That’s all the positive things I have to say about this entire book.
World-Building
This is going to seem like I’m immediately contradicting myself, but bear with me.
I like the concept of gate trees, different kinds of witches, and a cat-turned-human. But the way this book handled those ideas was severely lacking.
First, the gate trees rely heavily on cultural appropriation, which I’ll discuss in more detail later. They’re also inconsistent in terms of their specificity. Each gate leads to a different mythological underworld, representing Norse mythology, Hindu mythology, Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology, and Japanese mythology.
Do you see the problem yet?
Norse and Hindu are pretty specific categories. Greek and Egyptian less so, but people generally use those over-simplified terms to refer to a specific era and its selection of deities in those regions. But Japanese mythology? What does that mean? Shinto? Buddhism? There’s no deity mentioned in reference to this gate, so it’s impossible to know.
As for different types of witches, there’s a lack of clarity and consistency there, too. The three witches we see and hear the most from are Sarah Goode, the twins Hunter and Mercy, and their mother Abigail. They represent Green Witches (Sarah and Mercy), a Cosmic Witch (Hunter), and a Kitchen Witch (Abigail). As part of their practice, they each follow and seek guidance from a particular deity.
Abigail worships Athena, Greek goddess of war, wisdom, and handicrafts. But what does this have to do with being a kitchen witch? One could argue that handicrafts fall under this domain, but Abigail and any references to her practice seemed focused specifically on the kitchen, not other aspects of the home. There’s never any mention of her engaging with handcrafts.
Mercy worships Freya, Norse goddess of love, beauty, fertility, war, gold, and seiðr. I can’t find strong associations between her and earth or nature, so she seems a strange goddess for Mercy to worship as a Green Witch. Even in the text itself, Freya is identified only as a goddess of love, fertility, and divination. And it’s not unprecedented for a Green Witch to worship a nature goddess specifically, since the first witch we meet is Sarah Goode, a Green Witch who follows Gaea, Greek goddess and personification of earth.
Lastly, Hunter worships Tyr, Norse god of war and justice. She identifies him as the god of the sky, which would fit for a Cosmic Witch, but I can’t find any reliable sources on this online. And, getting into spoilers, she later renounces Tyr and chooses a goddess, who ends up making even less sense. Amphitrite is the Greek goddess of the sea, with no associations to the cosmos, even from dubious sources.
Why three of these witches don’t worship a deity associated with their chosen category of witchcraft is never explained or even acknowledged, nor do we ever find out how/why a particular deity is chosen. Similarly, I have no idea why Sarah and Abigail follow Greek goddesses, but Hunter and Mercy follow Norse deities.
The authors also made the strange choice to have each witch invoke their deity with unique exclamations or expletives, giving us Athena’s Shield, Freya’s Cloak, Holy Tyr, and even Bast’s spectacular nipples. But why would they do this? Each of these women are the only person in their community who follows that particular deity. No one else around them would ever use these phrases. How would something this specific come to be the phrase of choice for shouting when surprised or upset? Are witches encouraged to make up phrases like this? Why? What purpose does it serve — both in their personal lives and as a narrative tool?
Some elements of how the different types of magic are portrayed is also inconsistent. Specifically, Hunter and her tarot cards. They are wildly out of step with everything else we see of magic in this book. Normally, passive magic is subtle, like Mercy feeling the life and breath in the trees around her, or Hunter’s intuition guiding her on which moon-charged stones to use for a ritual. If the magic isn’t subtle, some sort of ritual or spellcasting is involved. But the tarot cards completely deviate from this. The design on the back changes with the moon phases, and the cards are blank until Hunter asks a question. Not only does this make them far too convenient in terms of advancing the plot, but it’s jarring in the context of everything else we see. Moreover, it raises a lot of questions. Why are they like this? How did Hunter come into possession of these cards? Did she make them herself? How long did that take, and how could such a young witch perfectly craft a magic item of such vast applicability and power? Modifying existing spells was presented as advanced and risky magic, so I have to imagine that creating a deck of tarot cards that constantly change is even more complicated.
And then there’s Xena, the cat-turned-human. Sometimes she seems confused and out-of-step with the human world, calling cell phones “phone devices” and a driver’s license “car papers”. But then she has no problem reading handwritten notes and incantations from ancient grimoires despite having no use for reading during her life as a cat. She even uses a cell phone unassisted with no issue during the climax. She also seems to be written based on stereotypes and assumptions about cat behaviours (they sleep long hours randomly throughout the day) versus actual cat behaviour (they’re most active at dusk and dawn), along with a strange fixation on human foods like cannabis truffles. And she’s simply not well-written. In addition to constantly calling everyone “kitten”, the narration emphasized and repeated the same actions over and over again. Every scene she’s includes multiple comments on her huge, multicolored hair, and multiple descriptions of her smoothing her hair with the back of her hand. It gets tedious.
Race
Since I’ve already mentioned cultural appropriation, I might as well tackle that issue now.
This book is written by a white woman and her mixed-race daughter, who identifies as black on social media. It features a long line of white witches protecting gates to underworlds based in Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Hindu, and Japanese mythologies — in the American Midwest. I could have easily posed this question in the world-building section, but I think it’s more apt here.
Why?
As far as I can tell, these gates only exist in this one location. When the twins speak with an Egyptian Gate Guardian, he only mentions there being one gate on his end, meaning the Egyptian underworld only opens to Goodeville, Illinois. But then how did these mythologies come to Egypt itself? How did the people there come to believe in and tell stories of the creatures that exist behind this gate? The same can be asked of any of these gates and the mythologies they represent. Why are these gates present in a region where the creatures that emerged from them aren’t known, worshipped, or featured in the stories of the historic populace? And why did the authors make protecting them the responsibility of a bunch of white women?
The history of Sarah Goode finding and closing these gates is also deeply problematic, creating a white saviour narrative. When recapping the story of how the gates came to be, Abigail and Hunter share this exchange:
“Hunter, why was this beautiful, fertile land unsettled and avoided even by the aboriginal peoples?”
“Because they were freaked out by the monsters that roamed around here, slaughtering anyone who got too close to where the ley lines converged.”
So the indigenous people were helpless to protect themselves from these monstrous incursions and had entirely abandoned the area. Enter Sarah Goode, who easily figures out how to fix the problem “[using] her witchy wisdom” — AKA magic rooted in European spirituality and practices — while conveniently evading the label of colonizer because the land was definitely, totally empty when she arrived.
(I’m still calling her a colonizer, though.)
Though indigenous people were powerless to protect themselves and their own territory, and not a single indigenous character actually appears in this book, they still show up numerous times to aid the white protagonists with their spells.
When Hunter casts a spell to alleviate Mercy’s grief, she uses rounded obsidian, calling them Apache Tears and invoking their power by “[thanking] the Apache Women who shed enough tears for their lifetime and ours.” In other words, a white woman invoked the historic and ongoing suffering of indigenous women to free another white woman of her sadness.
When discussing how the gates were originally sealed, Mercy states that “two Medicine Women from the Illinois tribe [were positioned] at the Greek and Hindu gates,” meaning indigenous people were entirely incapable of addressing the problem themselves but could certainly act as token accessories to the ritual a white colonizer used to save them.
When recreating this ritual, the twins decide to honour the Illinois people who once lived in the region. They decide a dove feather is “an appropriate gift in honor of the indigenous women”, but never specify why, leaving me to assume the authors were leaning on stereotypical associations between indigenous cultures and feathers. Things only get worse during the ritual when they “thank the people who came before [them] — whose land [they] now call [their] own.” Not only did Sarah Goode swoop in as a white saviour and them claim finder’s keepers on Illinois land to create a town named after herself, but now her descendants think claiming that land as their own is a great way to honour the indigenous people who have literally been forced out of that region by colonization.
That’s just how indigeneity is handled in this book. We’re not done talking about race yet.
Next, we need to discuss Jax and Emily, best friends of Hunter and Mercy, respectively. Both ambiguously brown. Both described with wildly different language than any of our white characters.
Hunter is described as pale, her inky black hair always in a ponytail, her eyes turquoise or blue-green. For comparison, Jax’s skin is smoked topaz and his hair is raven-coloured or earth-brown (yes, two different colours, inexplicably). His eyes, at least, are simply brown.
Mercy has sable hair and moss-green eyes. (Don’t ask me how identical twins have different natural hair and eye colours). Her skin is pale, but turns fawn with freckles in the summer. Emily’s hair is tightly curled mahogany; her skin is russet brown, fawn, and chestnut — yes, again, all different colours. And her eyes are golden and amber. Emily is also described with the most consistently sexualizing language of any other character in the book: long legs, narrow hips, a firm round ass, full lips. Even when she’s wracked with grief, the narration takes time to remind us how slim her waist is, that she has smooth cheeks, and describes the exact shade of her hair, skin, and eyes.
These are the most prominent characters of colour in the book, but I have no idea what their background is supposed to be. I don’t need to know exact heritage or what ancestor arrived from which country, but it is odd that the only non-white recurring characters are described in such exotifying but ambiguous language.
The only character of colour with a specific race attributed to him is Khenti, Gate Guardian of the Egyptian tree. He is described in much the same way: his skin is both bronze and acorn coloured with a hint of gold, and he has earth-coloured eyes.
For most of the white characters, their skin colour is never described, or at least not mentioned with much emphasis. They’re simply “pale” or “white”, and this is often only referenced in relation to how they react to something. For example, two characters turn the colour of milk to show shock or horror. Even when Mercy’s skin was described as fawn, it was to indicate when it turned darker. White characters are never porcelain or ivory or pearl or alabaster, despite POC so consistently being smoked topaz or mahogany or acorn or chestnut. It is a distinct imbalance and an Othering way of describing POC.
Gender and Sexuality
For a book about the legacy of female witches, it certainly has its share of slut shaming and internalized misogyny.
During the twins’ birthday party, Hunter and Jax deride Mercy for what they term “stripped dancing”, to the point that Hunter refuses to be seen dancing with her. Much later in the book, when meeting with her boyfriend after his football practice, Mercy herself is critical of the tradition of cheerleaders and football players having practice at the same time. Her language toward cheerleaders is also consistently belittling. Where football players jog to their locker room, cheerleaders flit. Where football players are observed genuinely practicing and drenched in sweat, cheerleaders are assumed to serve as “glorified water boys [who] caused more touchdowns in the backseat of cars than on the field.” As far as the book is concerned, cheerleaders can’t possibly be doing more than ditzing around and having sex, so having them practice alongside the football team is “a misogynistic ritual”.
On the other hand, this book includes a subplot where Mercy is slut shamed for engaging in sexual acts with her boyfriend. While this is obviously wrong and Kirk’s public humiliation of her is inexcusable, it is notable that this betrayal comes not even twenty minutes after Mercy’s narration essentially slut shamed cheerleaders for existing.
Moreover, the book includes the sex scene in question — in graphic detail. Spells Trouble is marketed to readers as young as fourteen and the characters involved are only sixteen. Mercy specifically had just turned sixteen a couple days prior. Explicit details were wholly unnecessary and, honestly, inappropriate. What readers need to know is that the two characters have sex, that Mercy feels confused and conflicted after, and that Kirk later shames her for it. Any more than that is gratuitous. It’s not appropriate for the genre or target audience, and it feels downright unsavory as an older reader — especially thinking about the ages of the authors involved in this project.
Put another way: What purpose does it serve to describe the size, girth, and texture of a 16-year-old boy’s penis? What purpose does it serve to describe what it feels like for a 16-year-old girl to have her boyfriend finish in her mouth? I can’t think of any way to answer these question that doesn’t sound skeevy.
And now we come to Hunter. She is the only confirmed queer character in this book, and she is completely miserable for it. I can’t recall a single moment where she experienced something resembling joy, pride, or even contentment about her sexuality. She’s been bullied for being a lesbian for years, and d*ke is used against her four times on page. She has no hope of finding a partner in her town of 5000 people, as there is apparently not a single other queer person living there. She also can’t easily leave this town because of her responsibility to protect the gate trees. However, she also never shows any interest in online LGBTQIA+ spaces or support groups, making her entirely isolated from any kind queer community. Her own sister criticizes her for choosing a god, assuming it is due to Hunter being a lesbian, and this leads to a huge falling out between them — meaning even Hunter’s once-supportive family is not a safe space for her. Her backstory is so miserable and traumatic that she is the one who holds things together after their mother dies, citing her experience with bullying as making her more resilient than Mercy. Every single one of her personal conflicts relates back to being a lesbian: her fight with Mercy, not liking Kirk and him being cruel to her, having to reject her god to try to protect the trees, grappling with the burden of losing her mother and having to pick up after her grieving twin, etc.
Worse, the constant bullying and ostracization, coupled with her eventual falling out with Mercy, seems to be setting Hunter up for some kind of villain arc. Which would make her turning to darker magic and ambitions a direct result of how miserable her life is as a queer woman. I can’t even begin to express how harmful this would be to queer readers, especially within the target demographic.
That’s not to say that you can’t show queer characters dealing with bigotry or hardship, or that you can’t have queer villains. But this is the only example of explicit queerness shown in Spells Trouble, and it is constantly and heavily emphasized as a terrible, traumatic, and ultimately corrupting experience.
Writing
The icing on this problematic cake is that it isn’t even well-written.
By my count, there are at least 27 sentences that are 40 words or longer, with the longest being 75 words. That’s not a sentence; it’s a paragraph! This mostly happens in Mercy’s chapters (21 instances), which were written by P.C. Cast. She also tended to be the author in this duo most prone to using out-of-place words, including: gloaming, abating, masticating, bespelled, infilling, and beseech. Additionally, P.C. has a habit to taking neutral words and making them explicitly feminine for no discernible reason. Some are odd but not unheard of, like songstress, and others are so wild they immediately pull me out of the story, like ancestress and protectoress.
(This trend is not exclusive to Spells Trouble, either, as the House of Night series and adjacent titles included curious word choice such as Prophetess, monstress, murderess, creatress, and sculptress.)
Kristin Cast, on the other hand, tends to use jarringly weird descriptions. There’s simple ones, like calling a stoplight “Christmas crimson” or the light from a blinker a “Halloween glow” (in the same chapter, no less). And then there’s stuff like this:
The only shirtless member stood on the row of seats flapping his arms like a goose.
When she turned on the charm, appeal poured from Emily like a tapped tree poured sap.
[The tears] rushed from her eyes like strands of pearls.
The attendant’s eyes, robin’s eggs pressed into her soft, round face, shimmered […]
[…] scarlet blooms that waterfalled like spilled cranberry juice over the lip of the pot […]
Rage surged through Hunter so hot and deep that her breath sloshed out in soupy gasps.
It’s hard to explain what’s wrong with these descriptions without breaking them down individually. The best way I can put it is that these either sound like a parody of stereotypes of bad YA writing, or like the writer enjoys poetic prose but doesn’t understand what makes it work.
Kristin’s chapters also tended to be quite choppy. This was typically a result of the same sentence structure being repeated over and over again, but was also sometimes due to the narration turning into a series of lists. I also found the writing disjointed at times, like there was a delay or disconnect between the actions and reactions of characters/environments.
Pain jabbed his left eye. He clapped his hand over the spikes of heat that blurred his vision and lurched forward. His forehead crashed into the mirror. “Mother — ” He stifled a roar and pushed himself away from the reflective glass. Shards rained onto the porcelain as he ran his fingers over the tender knot forming in the center of his forehead.
Not only is the sentence structure here very repetitive, but reading it feels like watching something from afar. I don’t feel his forehead hit the mirror. I don’t hear the impact or the shattering of glass — I’m not even sure when the mirror breaks. When his forehead hits it, or when he shoves away? These issues plagued most Kristin’s chapters in Spells Trouble.
Something both authors struggled with was writing teenagers. Their strategy seemed to be throwing around random slang, which mostly resulted in out-dated and try-hard writing. Some choice examples include yaaasss, hugsees, pressie, and saying BRB and OMG in dialogue. There is actually a point where one character says “I can’t even” in complete earnestness.
Conclusion
I can’t recommend this book to anyone for any reason. It’s poorly written in numerous ways, the world-building is inconsistent and leans heavily on appropriative and marginalizing concepts, the portrayal of POC is exotifying and dehumanizing, queer rep is handled in an extremely harmful manner, the voice is incredibly immature but some of the content is far too graphic for the target audience or the characters involved, and the feminism is hollow buzzword/pop culture feminism and rife with hypocrisy. Even as recently as 2021, P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast continue to create deeply problematic, harmful, and downright inexcusable content. I don’t advise picking up this book, and I would urge anyone considering other work by them to approach with caution.
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