The Change is a flawed novel, but by golly it sure cheered me up at times. This book is about three women in their late forties who develop magical powers and use them to avenge murdered young women. I’m forty-nine-and-a-half and my only perimenopausal superpower so far is the ability to give progressively less of a shit, and this book fit right in with my current mood. Unfortunately, the book was somewhat superficial and problematic in its portrayal of a Black character, which dramatically reduced my enjoyment and the grade.

Our story involves three women: Harriet, Jo, and Nessa. Harriet survived a bland marriage and a career in the fiercely misogynistic world of advertising until her husband left her for a very young woman and Harriet quit her job and pretty much everything else. She discovered a passion for plants, let her garden run wild, and developed a special sense about plants and people.

Jo has an eleven-year-old daughter and a husband who doesn’t do enough housework. In her forties, she quit a career in the hotel business (one in which she introduced policies that drastically reduced the amount of sexual harassment suffered by hotel employees) and opened a gym for women called Furious Fitness. Menopause gave her hot flashes strong enough to melt objects and burn people. Now she is reveling in her new business and her new strength.

Nessa is a retired nurse practitioner and a widow, with two daughters away at college. She has inherited the family gift of being able to see the dead and locate their hidden graves. When Nessa finds the body of a murdered girl, and sees that two other dead girls also want to be found and avenged, she teams up with Harriet and Jo to find out where the girls’ bodies are and how they died, and to wreak vengeance upon their killers.

As the women gain more confidence in their teamwork and their strengths, they settle into their roles:

“You’re the light that holds back the darkness,” Harriet said [to Nessa]. “Women like you have always existed. Without you, the world would be thrown out of balance…I’m the punishment that fits the crime.” Harriet returned to her work. “Jo is the rage that burns everything down…We all have our parts to play.”

Honestly, with the exception of Nessa’s ability to see dead people, this book would be exactly the same with no special powers at all which is both a weakness (why bother adding the powers, then?) and a strength (the metaphor regarding our ability to survive major life transitions and gain power with age is not lost on my about-to-turn-fifty self). Harriet could accomplish most of what she accomplishes with her extensive collection of books about plants and her give-no-fucks attitude. Jo doesn’t need any kind of super strength since she’s already very fit and well-trained in self-defense. Only Nessa really has to be magical, and having the most consistent magic user be the only Black woman in the group falls hard into the problematic Magical Negro trope territory.

On top of that, Nessa has spent her life as a caregiver (she was a nurse-practitioner) and continues to do so, doing a tremendous amount of emotional labor as not only the person who is literally haunted by murdered girls, but also as the person who comforts their mothers. She teeters hard on the line between a fully-fledged character and a stereotype, although this is somewhat mitigated by her strong sense of independence and her being the only one of the three main women to have a romance arc (that includes great sex!). These issues of stereotyping are really tricky to navigate and the lines are blurry, so I don’t know how much other people will see Nessa’s portrayal as problematic. I only know that while I loved her as a person, I felt uncomfortable with certain aspects of her role in the group given the damaging patterns into which Black female characters often fall in works of fiction.

Despite my concerns about Nessa, I loved these characters and their journeys and I loved the relationships they have with other people, especially the one that Jo has with her daughter, Lucy. Here’s a moment between them to cherish, after Jo has reviewed self-defense tactics with Lucy,

“There’s one more thing I want you to do if anyone tries to hurt you. I want you to look them right in the eyes and tell them ‘If you mess with me, my mother will fucking kill you.’ Make sure you use the word ‘fucking’ and look crazy when you say it.”

“Sure, I can do that.” Lucy sounded confident.

“Show me,” Jo ordered.

Lucy lowered her chin and looked up at her mother with a hideous grin. “If you mess with me, my mommy’s going to fucking kill you. She’s going to rip your intestines out of your butt and shove them into your eye sockets and out through your mouth.”

“Yeah.” Jo nodded with genuine appreciation. “If that doesn’t do the trick, I don’t know what will. Did you come up with that last bit yourself?”

“Yep!” The adorable eleven-year-old Lucy was back. “Pretty good, right?”

 

I also appreciated that although the male characters are thinly drawn, not all of them are bad, and not all of the female characters are good. I loved the friendship between the three women and the ways in which they helped each other grow. I liked the pace, which was slow enough to allow for a lot of characterization but quick enough to hold my interest.

Above all, I strongly vibed with the extremely high-quality female rage in this book and how it was mixed with the characters’ major life transitions. Several times the women remind each other that they have approximately thirty years left to live – what do they want to do with their time? As an imminent empty nester, I found the phrasing of that question to be useful. In the thirty years (barring accidents and major diseases and so forth) that I have left, in this next, multi-decade phase of my life, how do I want to empower others? How do I want to empower myself?

I wish I could just ride this wave of fury in perfect contentment, but the book had layered problems that never fully allowed me to relax into the story. There’s some fat shaming (of men), and as with all vigilante stories the ethics are shaky if you think too hard. There’s some diversity in terms of class, sexual orientation, and race, but with the exception of class, which is discussed a lot, these issues are not examined in any kind of depth, and the book desperately needed more depth to feel realistic and to avoid tokenism.

Another thing that bothered me is that all three of the murdered girls are specifically stated NOT to be sex workers. Why would this bug me? Well, the first thing the cops suspect is that the girls are sex workers, and Jo, Harriet, and Nessa always respond by angrily stating that it shouldn’t matter. And yet, almost the only thing we learn about these girls is that they aren’t sex workers. It comes up so often that it becomes a case wherein the lady doth protest too much. The repetition may be meant to criticize the tendency of police to assume that poor women are sex workers and that sex workers are disposable, but it models only “good girls” getting justice.

I’m coming down hard on this book because, while I appreciate that it does take a stab (harr see what I did there) at intersectional feminism, it falls really short, and that’s frustrating because the potential is RIGHT THERE. I’m also ambivalent about the book, because there was so much to like in contrast to all the problems. The female rage tone was just right for me, and I loved the relationships between women, not just the three friends but other women in the story as well. I loved the concept of building a life with a new purpose in the midst of menopause. I had a great time googling images for the plants that Harriet uses. I appreciated the twists in the plot. What I did not appreciate was a superficial and arguably problematic treatment of complicated issues. As it is, the book left me feeling both inspired and enraged – not unlike the characters.