Kids These Days Don't Go To 'Boarding School' Anymore (And that's a good thing)
Hi all and welcome to week three of the 2025 So Desensitized Spooky Season Spooktacular! October is going too fast for my liking, but here we are! Gonna be going a little of the beaten So Desensitized path with this week, with some of my favorite witchy books, starting with Grady Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, then moving on to Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle for Friday! Happy reading, stay spooky, and for the love of all that is holy please go to your local libraries and indie bookstores!
[The girls in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls may never have had a choice in their pregnancies, but you can help make sure others do by donating to this post’s charity, the Prairie Abortion Fund, which helps provide lifesaving healthcare to people in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota. https://www.prairieabortionfund.org/ ]
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is the latest book by horror mastermind Grady Hendrix (who I got to meet in June at the annual Horror Writers’ Association’s convention StokerCon! He was lovely, signed my notebook, and kindly ignored the fact that I choked on my own throat muscles trying to talk to him. Wonderful man.). It follows Fern, a pregnant teenager, who is made to go to a boarding house for pregnant teens in Florida and is given a book on witchcraft by the local librarian, which she then uses to return the power that the girls in the house have had stripped from them. It has a super cool cover - pictured above - that does a very good job of hiding how gruesome the story is.
Now, any story about that kind of home is going to be gruesome. They were awful places. The worst of pregnancy homes like that were the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, the last of which closed in 1996, which were essentially buildings in which pregnant girls were sent to do slave labor under nuns, usually, before having their babies taken from them after they gave birth. The ones in America, like the one in this book, kept the girls there until they gave birth, making them do manual labor and go through horrific treatments at the hands of the (male) doctor who was hired by the school, who prescribes bizarre diets and treatments that don’t do anything helpful in the best case, and actively harmful in the worst. But this story is particularly gruesome because of the, you guessed it, witchcraft.
When the mobile library visits the home, Fern is given a book on witchcraft by the librarian there, and uses it to restore some of the power that her and the other girls there have been robbed of. They transfer one of the girl’s awful nausea and vomiting to the doctor who refuses to take anything they say seriously, and, in doing so, open up a doorway to power similar to the one the coven in The Craft opens. But, as all magic does, it comes with a cost. There turns out to be a whole coven of older witches in the woods, led by the librarian, who have set up purposefully by the home to convince the girls there to join them, give them their bodies and powers. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more clear that the librarian’s motivations weren’t entirely benevolent, as she needs one of the girls to survive. Turns out, the coven just wants to use the girls’ bodies as tools for their own benefit, just like the doctors do, just like the people who run the home, the people who sent them there.
From its pitch and its little inner-cover blurb, you’d believe that the witches are the way the girls gain empowerment in this horrible situation. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but you wouldn’t be right, either. That’s what it is initially, as they use the book to bring harm on those who’ve abused them throughout their pregnancies. But when they won’t do what the librarian wants, either, she turns on them just like their families did. The only person who ever actually helps them is the cook, an African-American woman named Hagar, who uses her beliefs and, mostly practical skills, to help them with the coven and their pregnancies. And the most important thing to keep in mind about Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is that, like most things about witchcraft, it’s not actually about witchcraft. It’s about feminism, pregnancy, and bodily autonomy.
The most horrifying case in the home is that of Holly, an eleven year old who has been made pregnant by her priest back home. She doesn’t talk for the first half of the book or so. And, eventually, she is the one who agrees to join the coven because there’s nothing left for her anywhere else. Holly, more than anyone else in the home, speaks to the purpose of the book. It’s not really about the witches, or the coven, or the home. It’s about the autonomy women, especially pregnant women, are robbed of every day. You think that the coven is feminism, it’s their chance at freedom, when really it’s just something else that wants to use the girls and their bodies to its own gain. Only Holly, who has nothing else left, nowhere else to go, voluntarily joins. Because the coven only means bodily autonomy to her, because she’s never known it. It’s more community than anything, where she lost hers the moment that priest first attacked her. The other girls have known something other than usefulness, however, and so recognize the request that the coven is making as something violent and controlling to them. It isn’t that to Holly, because for her it’s sisterhood. The thing about feminism is that it means something different to everyone, and to the coven it means control at whatever the cost.
In fact, the coven is reminiscent of the old wives’ tales of witches that lived in the woods and stole babies. By setting up in the woods outside of a home meant specifically to take the babies of the girls who lived there, they adhere to that legend as closely as the can given the setting. Most modern beliefs consider those witches to be ones who could help with unwanted pregnancies for women in the village and were willing to be painted as villains for it, if that’s what it took to make sure those they helped were safe. And while the coven in these particular woods doesn’t entirely care that much about the safety of these girls, Holly does. She is willing to seem like a villain, to be exiled from society, if it means that her sisters will be safe and left alone. In a sense, Holly is the only true witch of any of them, because she understands what it is to be truly willing to give up everything about herself for the coven.
Now, it is worth noting that this book is set in 1970, during a period of time where ‘twilight births’ were the most common practice. The mother would be put completely under anesthesia for the duration of the birth and whatever complications came with it, then wake up to have her baby handed to her. For girls like Fern, who were teen parents in these maternity homes, they most likely never got to even meet their babies. They were made to sign papers agreeing to put the baby up for adoption before it was even born, so it was given immediately to the adoptive parents. Fern only meets her daughter because she begs the doctor for it. The absolute violation of practices like this is never shied away from, and is exemplary of the way pregnant teens - and women in general, let’s be honest - have been treated in America since before it had a name. So you can see why, under these kinds of circumstances, a coven of controlling witches seemed like a better option than any other one that was presented. That’s not to say that none of the girls in the home had any kind of hope - one of the girls plans to keep her baby for herself, the other has been promised marriage and a happy life after she has the baby - but that all of that hope was immediately and irrevocably removed on the day of, if not before. It’s very clear from the jump that none of them have any real choice in the matter, and the witches make them think that they do, at least, before robbing them of that, too, and putting them in worse danger than they were in before. And all of this is, of course, masterfully written in a way that reflects modern shifts in ideas about pregnancy and feminism. Oh, and remember: it was written by a man.
Grady Hendrix is, hands down, my favorite author of all time. I was even lucky enough to tell him as much. But even I had my doubts going into this book about the fact that it was by a man, from the perspective of a pregnant teenage girl in 1970. I was right to read it anyway, because damn if that man didn’t completely understand the assignment. First of all, he mentions in the acknowledgements that he learned of a family member he had going to one of those homes when he was younger, and didn’t know until he was an adult. He cites his sources, and the women he spoke to about their experiences with pregnancy and these homes. In no way, shape, or form does he believe that anything that happened in any of those homes was right. And really, he gets it. He has a very clear understanding of the different waves of feminism and our modern understanding of them. So, all in all, it’s really fine that Witchcraft for Wayward Girls was written by a man, because he did it right.
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is a brilliant book, and, if you are in your right mind, will make you potentially the angriest you’ve ever been. If you ever wanted to feel the visceral injustice of the way pregnant teens are treated in America coupled with some horrifying gore and the fear that comes with people you thought were meant to be there for you always turning on you, this is the book for you. If not, I understand. It’s not an easy read at all, and will mean different things to different people, as everything does. It’s about choice, and the illusion of it in such restrictive circumstances as the one the girls are placed in. It’s about how cults prey on vulnerable people with no other options. It’s about finding the right people in the worst places, and I hope I’ve done it justice here, because there’s just so much to unpack in it that I could probably write a whole book on it and never be done.
Thanks for reading all! Hope you enjoyed, and see you on Friday for The Raven Cycle! Happy reading, stay spooky, and patronize your local bookstores I don’t care if they take longer than Barnes & Nobles, they will order books in for you! 🪄📗💊🔪🩸