REVIEW: Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors by Perdita Finn

Reviewed by Candace Cahill

I read most of Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of Our Ancestors (Running Press; May 2026) sitting in the Denali wilderness, and that influenced how the book landed for me.

One afternoon, I read on the porch of a cabin built in 1924, sitting on wood a century of feet had worn smooth, considering the author Perdita Finn’s insistence that a long chain of ancestors was within reach if I only asked. I found myself listening harder than usual to birds singing around me, watching the shrubs dance in the wind, and noticing a snowshoe hare casually cross my path while the book lay open in my lap. I did indeed feel more connected to the past than I had in a while, even though I already think of myself as someone deeply tuned to the land I live on.

Reading Finn’s argument that the natural world is full of mothers speaking to us, if we’d only quiet down enough to listen, didn’t teach me something new so much as it opened a door that was already ajar a little wider.

Finn’s project is part memoir, part theory, part workbook—and together they hand the reader a spirituality with its feminine roots intact: not appended, not softened into a footnote, but load-bearing. The prose does this without turning precious or self-important, which is not a small thing to pull off in a book this openly devotional. I’ll admit that the devotionalism took me aback at first, but what moved me past that initial resistance was my own confidence in a spiritual foundation that doesn’t fully align with Finn’s. That confidence gave me the distance to take the book on its own terms rather than measure it against mine.

Even so, what keeps the book grounded is Finn’s own raw material: her mother’s body, her mother’s hunger, her mother’s instruction, on her deathbed, to skip the ashes and turn her into mulch for the roses instead. When Finn writes that her mother was a tiger, a seal, a crow, a spider, a snake, a vole, a hawk—”my mother was an animal”—it doesn’t read as metaphor performed for effect: it reads like someone describing a person she actually knew.

I came to this book already primed by my own history: I spent my college years studying how thoroughly Western religion dismantled and buried the mother goddess, how completely “God” got made male and stayed that way. I recognized the history Finn lays out about the witch trials, about communal mothering erased, about the “soul-silencing terror handed down from one woman to another” in a patriarchal society intent on muzzling anything “other.” There’s something in seeing that history stated this plainly, without hedging, that feels like permission to be as angry about it as I already was, and to let that anger sit next to the tenderness the rest of the book asks for.

What I keep coming back to is Finn’s insistence that this isn’t only a book about women: she frames motherhood as a birthright available to anyone, regardless of gender—a way of being in relationship to the world that patriarchy has spent centuries trying to convince us belongs to one narrow category of person. Reading this book felt like a small act of defiance against the status quo: not a loud one, just a private refusal to keep accepting the terms I was handed.

The book’s central conviction is one I already held before I opened it: that we have more say in creating our own reality than we tend to admit. What we dwell on, dread, or actively tend to shapes what we become, moment by moment. Finn’s version of that idea isn’t self-help bootstrapping; instead, it’s an invitation to ask for help. She’s not arguing that we manifest our way out of collective harm by force of will alone. She’s arguing that we can ask—the earth, the dead, our own ancestral mothers, whatever form that asking takes for a given reader—and that asking is itself a spiritual practice. Whether the help comes from a mother three generations back or from sitting still enough that a snowshoe hare carelessly crosses my path, we could all use whatever help is on offer.

By the time I closed the book, I wasn’t sure I’d absorbed it as theology so much as permission—permission to keep listening to the birds, to be angry about a history I already knew, and to believe that asking for help, from whatever mothers are still willing to give it, isn’t a failure of self-reliance: it’s the birthright the book keeps insisting we already have.