Title: River Witch
Publisher/Author: Rem Wigmore
Pages: 128pp

In modern-day Aotearoa (New Zealand), Ash Robinson is a witch alone. She takes her responsibilities towards the land and people seriously; it’s her job to protect the local water source, clean up the garbage, encourage plant growth, and nurture the wildlife; and she does so magically and physically. One day, while collecting bags of garbage along the Waikato River, she notices the birds and animals acting strangely. And then she realizes the river itself is acting … odd. Magically unhealthy. Tracing the rot to its source, she uncovers something even worse …. This is too big for Ash to take on herself. She needs help. But the only other witch in the area is the aloof and intimidating Bryony Manu. Can Ash work up the courage to ask for their assistance? And if Bryony does agree, will the two of them be enough to stop the rot spreading through the ecosystem?

Rem Wigmore has been on my To Read list for ages. Their books hit all the right notes for me: witchy, eco-focused, and queer-friendly. When I discovered some of their titles for sale on itch.io (not just the big sites), I snatched them right up.

River Witch is delightful. It’s sweet and humane, emphasizing the importance of kindness to ourselves and others. Friendship and found family are central to the narrative, that sense of family extending to other-than-human life. So is the interconnectivity of the natural world, the influence of one life on another and another and another, dominoing into the potential collapse of an entire bioregion — or the sustenance of that same bioregion.

The magic of River Witch is not the flashy stuff seen in so much modern urban fantasy. This is the little magic of green growing things, and rocks, and dreams. The magic of persistence and determination. The magic of meditation and intention, followed by the actual doing of the thing that needs to be done. Other authors would have just written a fancy magic scene: Ash in circle of fire and crystals and incense chanting in an obscure language and — boom! — problem solved. Not Wigmore. Here, Ash has to go out into the world and get her hands dirty. I really like that.

River Witch is sweet and inspiring. Highly recommended to Wigmore’s other books, as well as Otherside Magazine, the Scholarly Pursuits anthology, Fat Witch Summer by Lizzy Ives, Chai and Cat-tales by Lynn Strong, and Bookshop Witch by T. Thorn Coyle.