Somehow every year, Halloween comes earlier and earlier. Not by date, but by ramp-up to the celebration. It’s pumpkin spice everything time. So it’s only fitting that a great new dystopian novel redolent with the wondrous overlay of the witching world has found its way to our fall bookshelves. THE WOMEN COULD FLY will give you shades of Margaret Atwood and Octavia E. Butler dystopian realism with Shirley Jackson’s eerie, scary atmosphere and characters.

Josephine Thomas is looking for her long-lost mother, and the relationship between them in a world where witches exist and single women are suspicious gives us both chills and insight. Was she kidnapped? Murdered? A witch? Recast in a new identity? Single women, especially those who are Black, easily could be marked as witches, and the sad mistaken days of Salem, Massachusetts, could start all over again. Was she tried and imprisoned?

"THE WOMEN COULD FLY is a thoughtful, inspiring, spooky and disturbing yet optimistic story about possibilities, history, agency and life."

It’s been 14 years, and Jo (as she calls herself) is ready to make a new start. However, the laws state that all women must marry by the age of 30, or enroll in a registry that gives them no agency --- they will be monitored from that point forward, without any freedoms. Jo doesn’t want to get married but hates the alternative. So what’s a woman to do? Then comes dear mother’s will with a request for Jo that is like a Mission: Impossible demand, “should she choose to accept it.” THE WOMEN COULD FLY takes flight and brings the treacherous ideals of a fascistic society to play as Jo races against time to figure out what kind of future she can have and who her mother really was.

Megan Giddings is definitely chasing greatness here. And maybe a movie contract. I would do anything to turn this feminist fable into a big-screen delight. With its burgeoning sisterhoods and the lonely island where damage can be healed, and Jo constantly just around the corner from bad guys who want to drown her to see if she is a witch, the novel is hard to put down and absolutely one of the most entertaining books I have read in a long time.

Alice Hoffman gives us some whimsy and scares, and Butler reminded us of stone-cold threats in a racist and anti-female world, but Giddings offers us something else --- hope. Hope that women can learn to control negative forces, that we have always been looking out for each other no matter what, that there are few graces in a world that demands that every woman is only good for childbearing and rearing and nothing more. Jo and the women she meets along the way are searching for something greater, probably as Jo’s mom was. (And Josephine is the perfect homage to another Josephine, she of the March family, who would have loved this story herself).

THE WOMEN COULD FLY is a thoughtful, inspiring, spooky and disturbing yet optimistic story about possibilities, history, agency and life. The fact that Giddings managed to get all of this into such an elegantly told and entertaining story speaks to what hopefully will continue to be a very successful and creative path for her. I guarantee that you will want to thank her after enjoying this fantastic work.