By Grady Hendrix
Berkley, 2025. 482 pages. Horror.
Berkley, 2025. 482 pages. Horror.
Four teenage girls trapped in a secretive maternity home for unwed mothers in 1970 St. Augustine, Florida, find an unexpected source of power through witchcraft.
The pace is pretty slow until after the midpoint, but once it picks up it doesn't stop. In the end what makes the story truly scary isn't witchcraft, but the reality of the mostly powerless pregnant characters in regards to their bodies and their babies. As well as the societal atrocity of trying to collectively erase their experiences. However, the body horror does add an extra punch. Perfect for Hendrix's fans and for those who like their books with a smidgen of witchcraft.
If you like Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, you might also like:
By Kathryn A. Lowe
St. Martin's Press, 2019. 358 pages. Fiction.
In 1990s England, at an elite boarding school connected to seventeenth-century witch trials, troubled sixteen-year-old Violet is drawn into a circle of friends dabbling in witchcraft to avenge wrongs done to them.
By Ann Fessler
Penguin Press, 2006. 362 pages. Nonfiction.
This book brings to light the lives of 1.5 million single American women in the years following World War II who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced to give up their newborn children. It tells not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up. Single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy. The majority of the women interviewed by Fessler, herself an adoptee, have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives.
RBL
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