A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Weyward
Emilia Hart
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
I am a Weyward, and wild inside.
If this and The Spellshop combined don’t get me to take up gardening if I ever manage to get myself into a house, nothing will. (Spoiler alert: nothing will. But it’s nice to think about.) I seem to be on a roll lately with these witchy, gardeny books, and I’m not mad. Give me more. It turns out I have a real weakness for books about women who start over in cozy cottages with overgrown gardens and plant and/or animal companions. I don’t care if they’re all largely the same, I will read them all. I have to admit that I had some doubts about this book (naturally after I’d already bought it) based on the opinions of others, but I am so glad I did not give in to the urge to summarily unhaul it, because 35 pages was more than enough to tell me I would have been so wrong.
Born and bred in the quieter pockets of England, the Weyward family is a long line of women – typically one mother and one daughter, so generally no more than two at a time – who share a connection with all natural life, from the plants to the insects to the crows who act as their companions, or familiars, as they are later accused of being. This bond gives them a certain amount of sway over the natural world, along with healing abilities that tend to look like witchcraft. Each Weyward woman will traditionally tolerate a man just long enough for him to impregnate her with the next Weyward daughter, and so it goes through the generations until the early 1600s, when Jennet Weyward releases her favorite crow to the wild in the midst of the witch-burnings and tells her daughter Altha that they must avoid their very heritage in order to pass as innocent. This sacrifice seemingly comes to naught when Altha is arrested and tried for a crime she 100% committed, but she is acquitted when a single member of the jury – guilt-ridden after letting another woman burn without a word – argues, quite rightly, that they simply do not have the evidence to convict her. After the trial, she hitches a ride home from Lancaster and returns to Weyward Cottage in the village of Crows Beck, where she writes a manuscript explaining her decision to reclaim her heritage and kill a man. (TL;DR: he had it coming.) Upon finishing her confession, she stows it away for future Weyward generations to read and chooses a local man to father her daughter, and nothing more of note seems to happen for another 300 years.
In 1925, Elizabeth Weyward is seduced by Rupert, the violent, manipulative second son of the wealthy Ayres family seated in the neighboring Orton Hall. Knowing his parents will block the marriage (and craving the title of Viscount for himself), Rupert persuades Elizabeth to kill his parents and older brother in a murder nearly identical to the one committed by Altha 300 years earlier. Elizabeth believes him when he tells her his parents will try to destroy her and her mother Elinor, but realizes her mistake when the previously loving Rupert takes their children away from her and locks her in a tiny room with yellow wallpaper. Elinor tries repeatedly to reach her daughter and her grandchildren but is coldly rebuffed every time, and finally dies with only a secret letter from Elizabeth as a memento of sorts. Meanwhile, Rupert arranges for Elizabeth to receive a hysterectomy, without her knowledge or consent and completely against her will. Medical technology being what it is in the twentieth century, Elizabeth dies before either of her children has reached the age of two.
Fifteen years later, in the middle of World War II, Violet Elizabeth Ayres grows up with a strange affinity for insects, which is deemed unnatural and unladylike. Her younger brother Graham does not share this connection and takes no interest in the natural world, particularly after a traumatic incident involving bees. The two used to be closer, but age and distance have driven them apart: Violet resents Graham’s academic career, such as it is, while Graham – admitted to Harrow but not to Eton, to his father’s disappointment – resents Violet’s habit of stealing his schoolbooks. Though she knows her father will try to marry her off to the most suitable man who will have her, Violet dreams of becoming an entomologist. To this end, and with the threat of finishing school looming over her head, she agrees to behave herself during an extended visit from her older cousin Frederick, currently on leave from the war. She is repulsed by and attracted to Frederick in equal measures until he gets her drunk and rapes her, quickly escaping on the next train before his crime can be revealed. When the resulting pregnancy is discovered, he claims that she forced herself upon him and agrees to marry her on his next leave.
A furious Rupert dumps Violet at the abandoned Weyward Cottage, intending to keep her there until she can carry her pregnancy to term, but she finds a recipe for an abortion drug among Altha’s notes and brews it easily enough with the tansy she finds in the overgrown garden. She is found by Graham, who sneaked out of Orton Hall to visit her; but, despite his best efforts to help her disguise the abortion as a normal miscarriage, Rupert sniffs out the truth – or perhaps just blindly assumes, which produces the same result – and disinherits Violet when she refuses to accept the punishment of finishing school. Graham chooses to stay with her, though Rupert’s fatherly affection extends just far enough for him to cover the remainder of Graham’s time at Harrow. The Ayres title and Orton Hall both pass to Frederick, who becomes Tenth Viscount Kendall and holder of the Ayres estate, but Violet makes the remainder of his life absolute hell when she fills the Hall with insects of every description. Pest control efforts unavailing, Frederick ends up living in the study, where he makes a sort of nest for himself while the rest of the Hall thrums with insect life. Outside of the Hall, Violet goes on to become a globe-trotting entomologist with Graham’s help, and the two remain tightly knit until his death in 1997 (uh, I think – the math isn’t mathing). While Violet chooses to remain single, accepting that the Weyward line will die with her, Graham marries and has a son named Henry, who in his turn has a daughter named Kate.
In 2019, Kate – now 29 and on the run from Simon, her abusive boyfriend, whose behavior gained a new dimension of alarmingness when he began to demand a child – drives 200 miles from downtown London to Crows Beck in the dead of night, taking refuge in Weyward Cottage, which passed to her upon Violet’s death last August. Kate has taken great pains to conceal her inheritance from Simon and therefore is able to completely blindside him, but he gets the last word, sort of: she is pregnant with his child when she leaves. She arrives to find the cottage still standing but in shambles, covered with dust and filled with Violet’s insect drawings, while the garden is of course wild and overgrown. The early death of her father left her traumatized and shut off from her Weyward heritage, but as she settles into the cottage she naturally also begins to learn more about her previously unknown family, going all the way back to Altha. Initially terrified of everything nature-related, unsure whether she did the right thing and even more ambivalent about the baby, she gradually finds her own rhythm within the village and manages to befriend Emily, the kind-hearted owner of the bookstore, who hires her as an assistant. (Also, their workdays end at three?!?!?! Sign me up for that job.) At first she intends to abort the baby, but she chooses to keep it when she realizes it will be a Weyward daughter.
Outside of work, cottage restoration, and gardening, Kate has plenty to do: some casual gossip directs her to visit Frederick, now freed from Violet’s insects but deeply traumatized and almost completely senile, and she also visits Lancaster in search of information on her Weyward ancestors, though she finds very little beyond a couple of records documenting Altha’s trial and Elizabeth’s marriage. As her pregnancy progresses, she reconnects with her estranged mother and makes plans for her to stay in the cottage when the baby arrives. Unfortunately, some things can never stay buried, and Simon happens to be one of them. After a boneheaded, completely first-world mistake involving the wrong email, Simon tracks Kate down shortly before she is due to give birth and breaks into the cottage. Kate manages to hide in the attic, where she finds Altha’s manuscript by chance and reads it. Altha’s story triggers a fury in her that not even Simon can match, and she fully steps into the Weyward legacy, driving Simon out before he can do anything major. Simon is later caught and arrested by the police officers who were alerted by Emily, and Kate gives birth to a healthy, bellowing baby girl, whom she names Violet Altha.
In an epilogue set shortly before her death, Violet reminisces on her life and regrets her lack of connection with Kate, whom she has avoided ever since she inadvertently caused Henry’s death. She did not intend to kill him, but she had a vision of Kate being menaced by a golden-haired man with anger issues, delivered in conjunction with a vision of Kate getting run over by a car. She therefore set out to protect Kate by diverting her off the road before the car could hit her, but the timing was off: Henry died pushing Kate out of the way, and Kate ended up terrified of crows and completely disconnected from her heritage for the better part of two decades. Violet kept her distance afterwards, consoling herself with the thought that she had saved Kate from the Man Who Needs Therapy, only to realize far too late that the driver of the car and Needs Therapy Man were two completely separate people, and that she hadn’t saved Kate from shit. Wanting to make amends, and knowing that Kate was this generation’s Weyward daughter, she willed the cottage to her, hoping it would provide a refuge in case she ever left Simon. Just before dying, she leaves Kate a simple note with Altha’s manuscript: I hope she can help you as she helped me.
Okay, so I lied. I don’t want to live on Caltrey. I want to live in Crows Beck, specifically in a cottage. Why? Because they have a bookstore. I did not see anything in The Spellshop about a bookstore. I think I really just want a cottage to clean up and maybe even a garden to tidy. A cottage I didn’t have to pay for. I don’t see any reason I couldn’t just suddenly find out that I have a witchy relative who recently died and willed me her cottage. I could learn to like gardening. I need some project that does not involve a desperate struggle to find a sustainable career. I am dying to move to a small town, a village even, and set up shop as the village crazy lady/suspected witch. It’s not that crazy ladies don’t need money too, it’s more that they always seem to find a way of making it more easily than I do. Or maybe it’s just that their cost of living is more moderate than one would expect in, say, Baltimore. I would love to live in a place where I could walk to everything, which would at least cut down on my gas costs, with free healthcare and a quiet, peaceful atmosphere. I don’t care if people start calling me a witch. Maybe that’ll keep them from visiting.
As for the book itself, I loved it. I like the characters, even if I don’t wildly love them; Altha might be my favorite. I love that she keeps her independence in a time in which single ladies were even more distrusted than they are now, and I wish we had some hint of a future friendship – nay, a future relationship – with Grace, the woman whose husband she was (rightly) accused of murdering. They were driven apart by society and circumstance when they were thirteen, but Altha has always been sweet on Grace, and Grace still cares for her at least somewhat, even if she is outwardly hostile. I would have loved to see them reconcile. In the present day, I am immensely proud of Kate for having the courage and the strength to walk away from a terrible man. It took her a while and it was frustrating in places – I was ready to reach into the book and beat Simon to death with a mallet after he destroyed her first attempt to leave by threatening to commit suicide, girl, let him die – but the payoff was mostly satisfying, even if I would’ve liked it better if he hadn’t been able to lay hands on her. I am also so glad that Violet was able to pursue her dreams, and I adore her relationship with Graham, which starts out fractious but in the end is more powerful than all of their father’s threats and abuse. After their joint disinheritment he tells Violet he will pay for her to study her “blasted bugs,” and I love him for it.
Having said that, I am dissatisfied with Violet’s story, or rather her ending, because I don’t think it was necessary to pin her with the death of Henry. It could’ve been a freak accident. It didn’t have to be another link in a long chain of Weyward women trying desperately to thwart a prophecy and accidentally fulfilling it to the letter instead. We only see this happen twice – once with Elizabeth, who saw a frightening vision of Violet bleeding on the floor of Weyward Cottage and thought her marriage to Rupert would prevent it, and the second time with Violet’s botched interpretation of her own vision – but presumably it has happened to other Weyward women, given the familial tendency to leap without looking. Their connection to nature does not make them any less susceptible to horrible men and rash, impulsive decisions, though I wish it did. Jennet and Altha are the most cautious of the Weywards we have seen, obviously out of necessity; they are, after all, of the generation that has to be wary of witch-burnings. I also don’t care for Violet’s self-soothing assertion that Henry would’ve wanted this, because no, in fact, he wouldn’t have. She doesn’t go so far as to say that he wished to die – she merely tells herself he would’ve wished to die in Kate’s place if there was no other option – but it still rubs me the wrong way because I am confident that Henry would’ve wished to live long enough to watch his beloved daughter grow up. This is not callousness on Violet’s part, but it was a choice, and it wasn’t a good one. And, yes, she does make amends by giving Kate a safe place to escape (and especially by having the wherewithal to tell her lawyer to speak directly to Kate), but, again, that could’ve been accomplished without making her an unwittingly shortsighted secondhand murderer. I do not blame Kate at all for the death of her father and I never have, so I don’t know what this blame-shifting was supposed to accomplish. I only know that it didn’t work.
And now math, of which I have been doing an alarming amount recently, and I blame Orbital (Samantha Harvey) for getting me started. I am ambiguous on the date of Graham’s death because of a discrepancy between Kate’s and Violet’s accounts: in 2019, Kate says it’s been over twenty years since she was in Crows Beck for Graham’s funeral, which, assuming the funeral took place in 1997, is correct; in 2018, Violet says it’s been nearly twenty years since his death, which under the same assumption is very much incorrect. In 2019 Kate is 29, which means she was born in 1990. This means Henry died in 1999: she specifically says she was nine at the time of his death. In her epilogue, Violet states that Henry died two years after Graham’s funeral, meaning Kate was seven at the time of the funeral. All of this makes it clear that Graham did indeed die in 1997 – if it weren’t for Violet’s one contradictory statement. Most likely this is a mistake that didn’t get caught during editing, though it should’ve been, but it’s also possible that Violet is just a bit scatty, which honestly feels like a disservice to her character when she still seems perfectly sharp. On a related note, I am just sliiiiiiightly annoyed by Weyward genetics, because it seems like this family keeps churning out women who all look exactly the same and it’s kinda bugging me. Are they giving birth, or are they cloning themselves? Or does Nature just have a type?
I was hesitant on this book because my favorite BookTuber said it felt one-note to her, in that it was unrelieved grimness with women being abused and nothing really being done about it. I am relieved to say that I don’t agree. I am always here for a feel-good story about abusers getting the punishment they deserve, and this one delivered. Altha murders Grace’s husband after learning that he is violently abusive; Violet fills Orton Hall with insects after Frederick inherits the estate, permanently breaking his mind; Kate sics a full army of insects and birds on Simon, and later prepares to confront him in court with a victim impact statement. Kate’s story is, in my opinion, the most powerful: she starts out as a shell of herself, scared and alone and pregnant with Simon’s spawn, but she reclaims her agency and her child, and it was wonderful to watch her blossom as she rediscovered the power she was meant to inherit. As for Simon, I will pick up that bottle and force-feed him those pills, because he knew exactly what he was doing from the moment he picked the 23-year-old Kate as his next grooming project, and it was infuriating to watch. I hope his face was permanently ruined by those birds. Let him lose something he loves.
Final verdict: I am glad that I finally read this book, and I am glad that I suckered out and bought The Sirens before I’d even gotten to page 40, and I am glad that I didn’t listen to the more lukewarm opinions on the book. Above all, I am glad that I didn’t go off my head and unhaul the hardcover without a trial. I may possibly have found a kindred spirit in Hart, who states in her afterword that Weyward was inspired by The Blind Assassin and Alias Grace, both by Margaret Atwood (eeeeeee!!!). I can sort of see it. Grace Marks and Simon Jordan both have Weyward characters named after them, and the Weyward Grace is a redhead, as was Atwood’s Grace. (Can’t say the same for the historical Grace Marks; I don’t know if that information has been captured.) The story isn’t particularly similar to either, but it does make use of the novel-within-a-novel device used in The Blind Assassin, albeit a bit differently; where Iris Chase’s narration is intercut with chapters from a fictional novel that increasingly reflects the real lives of the characters, Altha’s story is presented less as a document of its own and more as another narrative voice, triplet to Violet’s and Kate’s chapters, until it is revealed as a manuscript at the very end.
Long story short, Hart might become a new auto-buy author, pending the results of The Sirens. Even if I didn’t love aspects of the ending and the constant abuse was a slog (I’m definitely with Regan on that one), I am satisfied with the payoff and interested in reading more. Fingers crossed that The Sirens also includes a cottage of some kind.
