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A review by laurareads87
Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power by Pam Grossman
Did not finish book.
I didn't finish.
I had higher hopes for this one, and it just wasn't what I expected. I will say I had zero familiarity with the author or her podcast before picking this up so that probably speaks to my not knowing really what to expect here.
It was way more meandering through the author's opinions about various pop culture witches than it was historical, and also a lot more personal anecdotes than I expected. The jumps from one pop culture depiction to the next didn't really make sense -- going from Crucible (massively influential - but the author's reading of it is super questionable to me) to films that IMDB doesn't even have entries for and/or barely were released at all and treating any (apparent) similarities as some sort of pervasive way of thinking is... not great. There are references to books but there is no bibliography and no complete citations, which is a problem. Finally, the feminism here is far from intersectional -- there are nods here and there to diversity and anti-oppression but sweeping statements like "women who don't have children are treated as worrisome" [109] speak to a lack of any real intersectional perspective.
I will say that I liked the discussion of how "real" witches and fictional / depictions of witches kind of run together in the historical record and how it's difficult to really meaningfully separate them at times; however, I also feel like this conflation ended up posing significant problems later in the book (when discussions of contemporary Witchcraft practices and fictional characters seems to run together in weird ways).
I had higher hopes for this one, and it just wasn't what I expected. I will say I had zero familiarity with the author or her podcast before picking this up so that probably speaks to my not knowing really what to expect here.
It was way more meandering through the author's opinions about various pop culture witches than it was historical, and also a lot more personal anecdotes than I expected. The jumps from one pop culture depiction to the next didn't really make sense -- going from Crucible (massively influential - but the author's reading of it is super questionable to me) to films that IMDB doesn't even have entries for and/or barely were released at all and treating any (apparent) similarities as some sort of pervasive way of thinking is... not great. There are references to books but there is no bibliography and no complete citations, which is a problem. Finally, the feminism here is far from intersectional -- there are nods here and there to diversity and anti-oppression but sweeping statements like "women who don't have children are treated as worrisome" [109] speak to a lack of any real intersectional perspective.
I will say that I liked the discussion of how "real" witches and fictional / depictions of witches kind of run together in the historical record and how it's difficult to really meaningfully separate them at times; however, I also feel like this conflation ended up posing significant problems later in the book (when discussions of contemporary Witchcraft practices and fictional characters seems to run together in weird ways).