Author Grady Hendrix casts a spell pitting teenage moms against institutionalized power.
Don’t expect bestselling author Grady Hendrix to cower in fear at the mention of witches.
Quite the reverse, in fact.
“The witches are coming,” Hendrix triumphantly declared to a raucous gathering of hundreds of fans at a Magic City Books event in Tulsa to launch his latest novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. “And I believe they are coming to save us.”
“Save us from what?” you might ask.
Well, in the case of Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, witches combat the abuses of the real-life institutionalized power that for decades condemned pregnant teenagers to live in private shame until they gave birth, only to have their children forcibly taken from them to facilitate adoptions by “respectable” parents.
The novel’s protagonist is Neva, who is 15 years old and six months pregnant in 1970 as her livid father drives her from their home in Alabama to an ominous mansion called Wellwood House in Florida.
He dumps her there amid a house full of “unwed mothers” just like herself, all awaiting their delivery dates with dread.
Even Neva’s name is taken from her when she is renamed “Fern” by the austere director of Wellwood House.
Fern and her similarly renamed roommates (Rose, Zinnia, Holly, etc.) are all forced to work off their time at the home with backbreaking chores and are regularly subjected to highly invasive – yet eerily indifferent – medical exams by the resident physician.
To say there is a power imbalance is a supreme understatement, and a potential solution does not immediately present itself.
Readers expecting spells from page one will have to be patient; the first mention of witches doesn’t appear until about page 115 and involves a library book named – of all things – How to Be a Groovy Witch. Remember, this is 1970.
“Knowledge is a kind of power,” the book explains, “and the knowledge you find in this book will help you find power inside yourself. Power is not a material possession that can be given. Power is the ability to act and that must always be taken, for no one will ever give that power to you. Those who have power wish to keep it, and those who want power must learn to take it.”
Encouraged by an enigmatic librarian, the girls decide to take back control of their lives, to regain power that, assuming they had any in the first place, they lost completely at the point they became pregnant.
The first spell the girls cast is called “Turnabout” and projects one’s misery – in this case, morning sickness – onto another – in this case, the house doctor.
The spell works fantastically, opening the girls up to the possibility for not just resistance, but for revenge and, most tantalizingly, potential escape.
As their experiments continue, the girls gradually become aware of a wider, more mysterious world than they have heretofore known, a world in which self-determining women wield significant power, including the ability to fly.
“We live in the margins,” Fern is told by one such woman, “the in-between places, and push back against this world as the opportunities arise.”
As the story progresses, opportunities for the girls to resist – and the obligations successful resistance demands – both stir the pot and drive the plot.
During Hendrix’s most recent visit to Tulsa – a 2017 visit promoted Paperbacks from Hell, his nonfiction look at the 70s and 80s horror fiction craze – the author talked less about Witchcraft for Wayward Girls per se and more about what he called “the nature of witches.”
As Hendrix framed it, witches – whether fictional, historical or somewhere in between – have always fallen into one of three groupings: young maidens, middle-age mothers or old crones.
His freewheeling survey of witchy women encompassed everything from the three witches that kickstart Macbeth and 19-year-old memoirist Mary MacLane to the infamous Salem Witch Trials and even social activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who sought to liberate 19th-century women from church control.
Still, for Hendrix, the most powerful spells will always be stories, and his prowess as both a storyteller and spellcaster are on display in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.
Though set more than 50 years ago, his latest novel seems very much “of today.” It features not only resonant social commentary but more than a hint of thunder, lightning and rain.
To purchase your copy of Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (and other Grady Hendrix books), visit bookshop.org, the indie bookstore alternative to Amazon.
###
Comments