Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (2025)
Premise: It’s the 70s and Fern (not her real name) has been dropped into this Home for what the title of the book calls “Wayward Girls” in Florida. That is, a place were underage, unmarried, pregnant teens can disappear from the world for a few months while they are “visiting and aunt” or “learning French in Europe” or “studying in England” or whatever.
So! You’ve got a house full of pregnant teens that are basically treated like something between “they don’t exist” to “you know this annoying old cupboard at home that you’d get rid of, but it’s a hassle so you just let it be?” by everyone in the universe. Then the universe comes closer and whispers in their ear “so, wanna do some witchy stuff?”.
Can you read it in a couple of sittings? If you’re a very fast reader I think so, it took me three without hurrying to the end line.
Do they say the title? No they don’t.
One sentence review: I’d side with the witches on this one, that’s for sure.
Okay, more: Okay, yeah sure, first things first: it might rub you the wrong way if you realize this is a book written by a middle aged dude where we follow the point of view of a very pregnant 15 year old. Thankfully he’s done his homework and this doesn’t get as awkward/cringy as you could imagine in any way, phew.
With that out of the way, once again this is a very very solid, very fun, very ugly, scary and at some points really disgusting novel, so no surprises there coming from Grady Hendrix. It’s not scared of getting really ugly about how quickly these women lose any agency they had, how they are treated like just dumb, idiot “girls”. Things get supernatural at times, things get extremely real often, and of course it also felt really bad the moment you remember this is written after stuff like Roe v Wade being overturned. Disgusting stuff, yah, and not just the bits with blood and gore.
But you know what didn’t feel bad? Reading this book! Another great book by Grady Hendrix and in my case a big surprise because for some reason I didn’t know it was out already!
A simple way to improve it: This author always adds some fun little in-universe snippets by the end of his books (stuff like a metal fanzine, or maybe some postcards from one character to another, or a recipe, or…) so it felt a bit sad when he didn’t, this time. Like, come on, the little snippets of “How to be a Groovy Witch” between chapters don’t count!
Trivia about the IMDb trivia Goodreads Random amazon reviews:
Eh, nothing funny. Too bad.
