Grady Hendrix is one of the authors I enjoy reading as soon as I find out a new book is available, which is amusing, since a few of his listed beta readers are authors I don't understand the appeal of particularly.
His last book was really nerve touchy though, and I found this one hitting a few nerves I didn't know I had, which indeed heightened my enjoyment,other than wanting to slap a few characters.
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in 1970, with unwed mothers from the south arriving in Saint Augustine, Florida, to deliver their babies for waiting adoptive parents. (I know one of the comments I read prior to reading this was wondering how a male author was going to tackle this subject matter. While I can't comment from experience here, he seems to do well with it.) Neva, our major focus character, arrive at the home and is promptly assigned the name Fern. (The mistress of the home, Miss Wellwood, assigns plant names to all the new arrivals, discouraging the girls from knowing anything about their lives outside their shame.) We have a nurse on sight, a doctor who does wellness exams through the pregnancy, a housekeeper/cook and her sister, and a social worker as staff. every two week, Miss Parcae comes with the Bookmobile. The girls don't leave the home until it's time to go "Downtown", and are discouraged from the woods, due to the murderous hippie encampment back there.
About a third of the way through, Miss Parcae slips Fern How to be a Groovy Witch, with instructions to keep it hidden from the adults. The first thing the coven of four Wayward girls does is cast a spell allowing Zinnia (the only black girl at the home; the cook is black, but she is a bit out of child bearing years. Zinnia is also almost force to stay in the home's attic until hippie Rose switches rooms with her) to transfer her morning sickness to the doctor. (This is actually pretty funny, and doc kind of deserves it; he keeps insisting the sickness is mental and a sign of her compromised morals.) Then it gets more serious, as we find out Holly, the youngest, is bearing her pastor's baby, and the pastor is planning on adopting the baby with his wife so he can continue molesting Holly and her daughter.
Zinnia is unhappy with the pact the coven signed, and keeps looking for ways to help Holly without magic. Rose ends up taking another path after she has her child; I won't spoil the surprises here, but her treatment is horrifying, and her revenge is just as horrifying. On the other hand, her revenge gives us a much better understanding of Miss Wellwood, and shows us Hagar, the black cook, is a rootworker who can counteract some of the more damaging coven magic. Eventually everything resolves, and no one really gets a happy ending, but things sort of work out for the best-ish. (An epilogue brings us several years into the future and shows us some of what happened after everyone left the home.)
The horror in here isn't just the The Craft style slip into power beyond their ability to understand or control, or the designs of the older coven; there's plenty of accurate non supernatural horror to go around here as well. The molestation, the girls trying to hide when they're going into labor to ry to keep their babies, mothers getting threatened to get locked up so they can have the baby taken away due to insanity, the episiotomy and stitches the doctor tells the mother her future husband will appreciate, the treatment of unwed pregnant girls by outsiders, the fact that all the mothers to be be chain smoke, the way the fathers of the babies and the fathers of the mothers treat them...I mean, the amount of people I wanted to smack in here was horrendous. I realize it's a fairly accurate representation of the homes and the attitudes of the time, but wow, it's ugly. Also got me thinking about my grandmother's support of the home here in Columbus, and realizing it wasn't just a southern thing. Also the lack of any kind of sex ed for the characters hurts.
A very good book, and frankly way more serious than what Hendrix usually produces.
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