The Witches of New York (Ami McKay's Witches)
Witches of New York • Book 1
by Ami McKay
Why You'll Love This
Victorian New York, where witches hang a shingle and the city can't decide whether to worship or destroy them.
- Great if you want: atmospheric historical fiction with feminist bite and genuine magic
- The experience: slow, layered, and richly textured — more mood than momentum
- The writing: McKay weaves in period documents, recipes, and folklore as structural texture
- Skip if: you need a tight plot — this lingers and sprawls at 528 pages
About This Book
Set in the crackling, gas-lit world of 1880s New York, this novel follows two witches who run a tea shop where the services include herbalism, fortune-telling, and the kind of wisdom that polite society both craves and fears. When they take on a young shop girl whose raw power eclipses anything they've encountered before, the three women find themselves bound together — and hunted for it. McKay captures a moment when spiritualism and science jostled for legitimacy in the same parlors, and she uses that tension to ask harder questions about who gets to claim knowledge, and what it costs women who dare to.
What sets this book apart is McKay's layered, atmospheric prose, which moves fluidly between the intimate and the epic without losing its grip on either. She weaves in period newspaper clippings, advertisements, and folk recipes that make the world feel genuinely inhabited rather than constructed. The result is a novel with real texture — dense, immersive, and confident in its own rhythms. Readers who love history braided tightly with the uncanny will find this one difficult to put down.