Breakaway Books

Authored by Anna Rasche; Published October 2024; Fantasy

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

For a book set during the black plague, The Stone Witch of Florence is quite a lot of fun. It may be dark humor, but humor certainly abounds.

The Stone Witch of Florence follows Ginevra, a poor young woman gifted in a specific type of magic connected to stones, as she discovers her powers and then uses them haphazardly to heal as many people as she can. She soon finds out just how perilous it can be to practice magic in a city ruled by the Catholic Church. Ginevra is an irresistible heroine who wears her heart on her sleeve and quickly gains friends and loyalty wherever she goes.

There’s a sweetness at the core of this book: The villain hidden in shadows is quickly, with sympathy, transformed into a friend; the woman who grants Ginevra shelter is completely unskilled, a comical figure who nonetheless stumbles into helping her. The brightness of Ginevra’s relationships manages to outshine the horror of the plague. 

But really, it’s the humor that sets the book apart. Ginevra walks into scene after scene of slapstick humor, poking gentle fun at the church, its saints, and its relics. The tone throughout the novel invites laughter and joking—and that says a lot, considering how it may also invite readers to remember their own recent pandemic. It delivers a happy ending, one that doesn’t require a man or a marriage, just women helping each other to stand on their own two feet. The magic is a light sort of system, which has a price of course, but does not overshadow the brightness of the rest of the novel.

With the humor, the hope, and the strong women, it’s no wonder that I loved The Stone Witch of Florence.