Hugos 2025: A Sorceress Comes to Call by Ursula Vernon

I have enjoyed a lot of previous books and stories by T. Kingfisher/Ursula Vernon, but this one didn't do it for me at all. I find it a bit hard to enumerate exactly why, to be honest, but I'm going to try.

The book has two protagonists. One is the daughter of a sorceress; the sorceress has (among other powers) the ability to make people "obedient," which forces them to do exactly what she wants. She often uses this on her own daughter as a form of punishment, making her do certain things she doesn't actually want to do. When the book opens, the mother decides she wants to get married, so the two of them head off to woo a rich man, the sorceress coming up with an excuse for them to be houseguests. (The book seems to take place in a place that is vaguely nineteenth-century Britain, though not exactly.)

The other protagonist is the middle-aged sister of the sorceress's target, who is skeptical of this woman intruding into their lives and decides to get rid of her... but also eventually realizes that this woman's daughter needs saving from her too.

A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher

Published: 2024
Acquired: April 2025
Read: July 2025

In the acknowledgements, Vernon says her influence was the genre of regency romance but it more reminded me of Victorian sensation novels by Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon (or later writers influenced by them, like Thomas Hardy), where the main threat is that the Wrong Marriage is going to happen with catastrophic consequences. Unfortunately, compared to these novelists, the book very much comes up short. In a book by Collins or Braddon or Hardy, one very much feels the threat of the marriage, the inexorable pull of how it's going to wreck everyone's life. But I found that the tone didn't really come across here, as the sister would talk about how big a threat the sorceress was... but then kind of just sit around and throw a big house party, which didn't seem to correlate. Tonally, the moment where the book really fails is that the sorceress succeeds in marrying the brother... but the characters don't react with horror or anything, they're just like "oh well" and continue with their plans to try to stop (now undo) the marriage. I thought it was very weirdly handled, very much a lost opportunity.

The book is, unfortunately, filled with little moments that don't quite vibe right and thus stopped me from feeling invested. The daughter's only friend in her mother's household is their family's horse; it's supposed to be a big betrayal that the horse is actually her mother's familiar and has thus been funneling information to the mother all along... but we've only just been told this about the horse, so it doesn't come across at all. I had very little sense of what the brother saw in the sorceress; the linchpin of the sorceress's plan is that the brother is in love with her but the sorceress can't use magic to make this happen, yet we don't really get to see how she wins him over. Everyone else is onto her so quickly it makes the brother seem like quite a dunderhead. The sister has this subplot about not wanting to marry the guy she's in love with, but it never clearly came across why she had turned him down.

It's a shame because the basic concept of making people obedient and using it to explore the dynamics of child abuse seems quite potent, but I felt like the book largely squandered it. I don't think there's one big way in which this book whiffed it, but add up all my complaints above, and you end up with a book I never engaged with on any level, perhaps the first time that's ever happened to me with Vernon/Kingfisher.