Why are you witch-hunting me? I'm right!
We are the witches of the books you didn't hunt, or whatever.
There is something extremely special about Everyone Knows Your Mother Is A Witch. It simultaneously feels so firmly set in its time while also being incredibly personal and relatable, like if your best friend was from the 1600s and called you up to tell you all about how her cows have milk fever and her dumb neighbor’s third-rate-glazier husband keeps trying to start beefs.
This book is based on the real story of Johannes Kepler’s mother being imprisoned for witchcraft, and Rivka Galchen has done an incredible job of blending richly researched historical context with the familiar story of a woman taking her lumps for not remaining unassuming enough. Also it is important to me that you know before you read it that Katharina’s beloved cow Chamomile is fine the entire time. I spent a lot of this book worried that she would return from prison and find something bad had happened to Chamomile so please rest assured that Chamomile is fine.
I once interviewed a bunch of witches about their self-care routines for a lifestyle assignment (AS ONE DOES) and something almost all of them mentioned loving about their practice was that it was a spiritual path that felt new and different, a kind of sidestepping of the more typical religious format (namely, a hierarchy made up of a bunch of progressively bigger and more powerful Dads) in an attempt to find something smaller, more personal, less hegemonic, and without what I’d feel comfortable paraphrasing as “man stink” all over it. That’s the purpose magic seems to serve in Weyward. Through three different timelines, three generations of women from the same family struggle to pull free of suffocating social expectations (and gendered violence) and make their way back to the wilderness, from which each is able to call incredible power, and the ancestral Weyward cottage, which serves as a physical refuge for each woman to disconnect from the world and create their own rules and terms. I was a little worried this book was going to be an overly serious manifestation of that “we are the daughters of the witches you didn’t burn” tweet, but it’s got a lot more juice than that.
OK, so the protagonist of Anatomy: A Love Story is not precisely a witch but she is a teenage girl who wants to perform surgery in early 19th century Scotland which will basically earn you The Witch Treatment so I’m throwing her in here. A member of a minor aristocratic family, the only control Hazel Sinnett has over the direction of her life is what she is able to wring out of it with her own bare hands as she risks banishment and maybe prison time to build a secret laboratory in the basement of her manor and take classes at the medical college in drag and pay a “resurrection man” to provide her with cadavers of questionable provenance to learn anatomy on and yes also she does kiss the resurrection man a little bit because WOMEN CAN HAVE IT ALL.