While reading for Locus this year, I kept an unofficial list of notes about things I wanted to mention in my end-of-the-year essay. The biggest word on the list is “WITCHES,” which cropped up in more than one memorable title to cross my desk. From the field hockey team that takes a solemn oath within an Emilio Estevez notebook in Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks to the mill workers who cast a life-saving spell for union solidarity in C.S. Malerich’s Factory Witches of Lowell, witches factored largely in 2020 fantasy fiction. The wide variety of class, ethnicity, and circumstance that showed up in all of these titles was dazzling, and I enjoyed each and every one immensely.