“In this world there is one truth; everything has a price, and every price must be paid.”
-Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, Grady Hendrix
Fifteen-year-old Fern (not her real name but the name she is given for most of the book) is a girl in trouble. It’s Flordia in the summer of 1970 in this novel (although Fern hails from Alabama) and Fern is in the unwed mother-to-be kind of trouble. She is also, I will point out fifteen, but in the time and place in the book, it is the unwed thing that has made her parents tell everyone she has gone to drama camp, while in reality she’s gone to a home for unwed mothers. There she’ll wait to have her baby, then she’ll give up the baby, and then she’ll go home and it will be like none of this ever happened.
“She didn’t think things could get any worse, then she saw the sign. ‘Welcome to Flordia,’ it read. ‘The Sunshine State.’”
-Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, Grady Hendrix
But over the end of Fern’s pregnancy which coincides with the end of the summer of 1970, big changes are happening at the Wellwood Home. Fern’s been given a book about magic (How to Be a Groovy Witch), she forms a coven with some of the other pregnant girls, and for the first time, they have access to power. But as they are warned, everything comes with a price, and there is a very hefty price to be paid.
Let me just say – I loved this book. Hands down, it is my favourite Grady Hendrix book, and I am a Grady Hendrix fan. Yes, there is a supernatural element (the witches are legitimate witches and workers in this case of dark magic, and the magic on display in the book is sometimes very scary). This book is about witches but also mostly about young women who were given no autonomy over their bodies, given no choice about what happened to their babies, and in some cases not given any choice about the sex that led to the pregnancy. The way the girls are treated isn’t always overly cruel, but it is not nice. And it can be very cruel, especially when it comes to the way they are treated by their families, medical practitioners, and others because they sinned by becoming pregnant while unwed. They are robbed of their names when they get to the home (and given a botanical name), and then later they get robbed of their babies.
It would be easy for Hendrix to have painted most of the staff of the Wellwood Home as cruel adults, and they are far from perfect. They are mostly – not great to the girls (and one of the characters who seems to be the most benign of them at first, may in fact be the evilest…) but they are shaded in shades of grey. They have cruel moments, and then many of them have moments of kindness, or bravery, or just have some backstory provided to explain partially why they are the way they are. There was an easy out there, and I like that the author didn’t take it.
It did sometimes get a bit confusing for me trying to keep track of which girls were how far along in their pregnancies, and keeping track of what bit of backstories the girls were able to share. The main focus is on Fern, Rose (who was a lot … but I think she might have been my favourite character) Zinnia, the most logical, and Holly who is just fourteen and is having a baby. That one – Holly’s backstory is particularly tragic and upsetting.
Being a 1980s baby, who was raised in Canada can’t speak to the accuracy of the 1970s United States setting, but having consumed a lot of media set in the 70’s it rang true to me. I also noted a few phrases I have heard my (was a teenager) in the 1970’s mother use. That said, while I understand it was still a thing to do in the 1970s any character who started smoking while pregnant gave me pause every time they lit up.
The supernatural element is not as strong as I thought it would be going in. It is very much there, and it drives a lot of the plot, but it doesn’t really kick into overdrive until a little over halfway through the book. But when it does – wow. The rules for magic in this universe are harsh, demanding a lot and giving back in some truly vicious ways to those who are the targets of the spell. There is also a section that was one of the more tense scenes I’ve read in a book. It played perfectly, and I would not recommend reading it when you are alone on a windy January night when there are weird noises afoot.
Because it is Grady Hendrix, it does get a bit … weird at times. Not as weird as some of his previous books (I’m still recovering from How to Sell a Haunted House, hahaha) so I’d actually recommend this to a wider audience than I recommend his other books.