By Grady Hendrix c.2025, Berkley, $30.00, 496 pages
So when are you due? Do you want to know now, long before then, or will you wait to see if your baby’s a boy or a girl? Another question: will you buy pink clothes, blue ones or, as in the new book “ Witchcraft for Wayward Girls” by Grady Hendrix, will you wait to know witch?
She tried to keep her pregnancy under wraps, literally.
It was the spring of 1970 and Neva had been wearing elastic girdles around her belly for weeks but hiding her bulge was now impossible; soon, everybody’d know she was a “loose girl” who destroyed her virtue by sleeping with a boy out of wedlock. That wouldn’t do for her parents, who didn’t want everyone to see the family’s shame, so Neva’s father took her to a Home for Unwed Mothers in Florida and he left without saying goodbye.
Then Miss Wellwood, owner of the Home, stripped Neva of her identity.
On that day, Neva became “Fern.” Though she was devastated — she just wanted everything normal again — Fern adjusted and even made friends. There was beautiful Rose, who planned on keeping her baby despite her parents’ wishes and Miss Wellwood’s demands; Zinnia, the only “colored” girl at the Home, who was Fern’s voice of reason; and little Holly, barely 14 years old, who refused to talk.
But one day, Holly did talk, and she told her roommates that she was molested by her preacher since she was 8 years old. The preacher would adopt her baby, Holly would be sent home, and probably abused again.
Outraged, Fern, Zinnia and Rose began to conjure a plan. The Home’s bookmobile librarian had just given Fern a book of witchcraft, and Fern devoured everything she read. There was help for Holly there, and revenge for Rose, Fern was sure.
And so, on a summer evening, the girls sneaked away to the woods, to a clearing by the trees. It was warm and moonlit, a fine night for casting a curse… Scary? Eh, not terribly so, but “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls” is definitely edgy, in a V. C. Andrews sort of way, like those kinds of adolescent-girl, witchy-occult paperback books from the ’70s. Indeed, author Grady Hendrix sets this story directly in that time-frame, which gives it just the right vibe. It has its moments of hair-raising and it can lag a little here and there, but like its forebears from 50 years ago, it’s mostly tame and mostly safe.
It’s also quite readable, with a cast of young women on the cusp of adulthood, paying for something that, historically, wouldn’t be shameful soon because feminism and new attitudes were on their way. Readers old enough to remember this time and this enduringly popular novel genre will be flush with nostalgia in this book.
Readers too young to remember: Welcome to the fold.
Be aware of the content, and “Witchcraft for Wayward Girls” can be enjoyed by any horror-occult fan ages 16 and up. If you’ve been waiting for a book like this, you’re overdue.
— The Bookworm Sez
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