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A review by gilroi
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.25
I want to say first that I didn't hate this novel-- it isn't bad, it's just not for me. I think if I hadn't read Hendrix's other works before this one, I'd have either liked it better, or never finished it. I do think that this is a very ambitious novel, possibly the most ambitious I've seen Hendrix try yet. I just don't think it lands, but I also think that's just because of my personal taste.
For me, a novel lives and dies on its pacing, and this is the worst paced Hendrix novel I've read (and I've read all of his fiction except Horrorstör and The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires). I think the unevenness of the pacing really undercuts the themes Hendrix is trying to work with. I find those themes very admirable and interesting! I think they're also very ambitious for an author like Hendrix.
Hendrix has his predilections-- he is clearly interested in writing about southern women, specifically white women, specifically 'normal' women. By 'normal' I mean women with no supernatural powers or ridiculous skills (except being a bassist, one time), but also he wants them to have an extremely realistic psychology. They don't know they're in a horror novel, and they react accordingly-- frequently these girls are selfish, self-defeating and cowardly. Hendrix isn't interested in Strong Female Characters as a trope; these characters are meant to be relatable, not inspirational. We're not supposed to think 'I wish I was her', we're supposed to think 'if she could, maybe I can'.
And that's fine and works great, because Hendrix's stories are often campy and vaguely comedic. He can write straight-up horror-- I think The Final Girl Support Group is pretty light on comedy; everything is drenched in tension. That book also deals with the most heavy subjects of his works: murder, specifically femicide, school shootings, and dying of cancer. If you inserted comedy into that mix, it'd feel a little lopsided.
So you see where I'm going? This book deals with some pretty heavy subjects, and it's got a lot of comedy, and a very cowardly protagonist. I'm not saying the protagonist of this novel shouldn't be cowardly; one of the main themes of this book is how much the main characters are all children, and I think that's a very good and fair theme for this subject matter. I just think that the mixture of comedy, very slow pacing, and extremely serious subject matter (child sexual abuse , which is barely a spoiler as it's pretty obvious from the book's blurb and content warnings, but whatever) makes the book feel... bad. Not bad in the way a horror story should make you feel, frightened and anxious, but for me at least, it meant spending a lot of time with a girl who was doing nothing to help a very vulnerable person while the clock wound down.
A lot of this book is spent sitting, waiting and talking. I understand why-- I once spent a summer in Virginia and the summers there are slow and hot. The book brilliantly evokes this lazy, sweaty feeling. But knowing that every hour that passes is another hour closer to someone being sent back to one of the worst situations a child can land in makes me want to rip off my fingernails. Add to that a long conga of humorous scenes, and multiple instances where the main character could help but flinches away and I'm straight up not having a good time.
But it's stretching Hendrix, who usually doesn't write about people from these intense sorts of backgrounds. You can sort of feel his focus flickering, because the book also flinches away from the characters who are out of his wheelhouse-- the character with an intensely traumatic childhood, and also the Black women. This is the first Hendrix book with more than one Black character, and all three of them are alive for the whole book! It's a mixed bag for Hendrix, who kind of doesn't know what to do with these women for a lot of the novel. Without spoiling too much, they frequently feel underwritten, one of them having almost no discernible personality (beyond the fact that she never talks), and the other two existing to prop up the white main character and deliver some deus ex machinas. There's a palpable friction between the fact that Hendrix wants to write a white female character of middle class economic means as his protagonist (from the afterward, it's clear that she's based on relatives of his, so I understand this desire) and his desire to do better than his previous novels when it comes to the writing of Black and disadvantaged characters. This book really should have been about anyone but Fern, whose perspective only really gives you an everywoman account of what takes place. I wouldn't even call the underwritten aspects of the Black and disadvantaged characters an -ism, because the main character is also underwritten.
In general, this book feels like a novella stretched to fit a novel's length. There's a lot of filling, a lot of the plot not progressing for convenient reasons (for example, there's a magic book that only shows important information when the main characters 'need' it; conveniently, they only get it this info once a huge amount of time has ticked down, forcing conflict after chapters and chapters where very little happens that progresses the plot or deepens characterization). Reading the afterward and finding out that the first two drafts of this book didn't even have the titular witches really makes sense; they frequently feel misplaced, and they disappear from the story for huge swaths of time.
This book feels extremely sophomoric for a writer of Hendrix's caliber, and I don't mean that in the sense that he's a perfect writer with no flaws; I mean that his previous two novels-- which I really, really loved-- are head and shoulders above this one in terms of craft. (You can weigh the merits of his attempts at representation for yourself.) While I have other gripes with this book*, those are very much my personal feelings, which is fine, because in the end, this book isn't made for me. It kind of feels bad, I guess, because his previous books were, but I can get over that.
If you want a very quirky and slightly twee story that is very light on actual horror (except for all the gore), this is a great book for you, especially if you want a story about the power of female friendship, motherhood, and a very well researched period drama.
*I just don't think he did enough academic research on the history of 'witchcraft' but I do appreciate that his witches were at least not more fucking Gardnerians. I deeply resent that ridiculous speech about The Burning Times-- yes, it was capitalized like that-- but I understand that it was given from the perspective of a 'witch' who was raised in a western / Mediterranean-inspired tradition, and that erroneous and ridiculous perspective is very alive and well today. We can see from the covens Hendrix thanks in the afterward that he probably picked it up from one of them, which, fine, whatever, I just hate it. (For more on this, I encourage you to read The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present, which is excellent, informative, and is a comparatively very easy read. Apparently Hendrix did research the history of witchcraft, he just portrayed it in a way I didn't personally like, which, again, this is very much a personal quibble than an objective mark of quality. Happy to be wrong!
Also I just hated the epilogue, but I can tell that's a personal feeling and half because it's pages and pages of italics. As a dyslexic: don't do that shit to me.
For me, a novel lives and dies on its pacing, and this is the worst paced Hendrix novel I've read (and I've read all of his fiction except Horrorstör and The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires). I think the unevenness of the pacing really undercuts the themes Hendrix is trying to work with. I find those themes very admirable and interesting! I think they're also very ambitious for an author like Hendrix.
Hendrix has his predilections-- he is clearly interested in writing about southern women, specifically white women, specifically 'normal' women. By 'normal' I mean women with no supernatural powers or ridiculous skills (except being a bassist, one time), but also he wants them to have an extremely realistic psychology. They don't know they're in a horror novel, and they react accordingly-- frequently these girls are selfish, self-defeating and cowardly. Hendrix isn't interested in Strong Female Characters as a trope; these characters are meant to be relatable, not inspirational. We're not supposed to think 'I wish I was her', we're supposed to think 'if she could, maybe I can'.
And that's fine and works great, because Hendrix's stories are often campy and vaguely comedic. He can write straight-up horror-- I think The Final Girl Support Group is pretty light on comedy; everything is drenched in tension. That book also deals with the most heavy subjects of his works: murder, specifically femicide, school shootings, and dying of cancer. If you inserted comedy into that mix, it'd feel a little lopsided.
So you see where I'm going? This book deals with some pretty heavy subjects, and it's got a lot of comedy, and a very cowardly protagonist. I'm not saying the protagonist of this novel shouldn't be cowardly; one of the main themes of this book is how much the main characters are all children, and I think that's a very good and fair theme for this subject matter. I just think that the mixture of comedy, very slow pacing, and extremely serious subject matter (
A lot of this book is spent sitting, waiting and talking. I understand why-- I once spent a summer in Virginia and the summers there are slow and hot. The book brilliantly evokes this lazy, sweaty feeling. But knowing that every hour that passes is another hour closer to someone being sent back to one of the worst situations a child can land in makes me want to rip off my fingernails. Add to that a long conga of humorous scenes, and multiple instances where the main character could help but flinches away and I'm straight up not having a good time.
But it's stretching Hendrix, who usually doesn't write about people from these intense sorts of backgrounds. You can sort of feel his focus flickering, because the book also flinches away from the characters who are out of his wheelhouse-- the character with an intensely traumatic childhood, and also the Black women. This is the first Hendrix book with more than one Black character, and all three of them are alive for the whole book! It's a mixed bag for Hendrix, who kind of doesn't know what to do with these women for a lot of the novel. Without spoiling too much, they frequently feel underwritten, one of them having almost no discernible personality (beyond the fact that she never talks), and the other two existing to prop up the white main character and deliver some deus ex machinas. There's a palpable friction between the fact that Hendrix wants to write a white female character of middle class economic means as his protagonist (from the afterward, it's clear that she's based on relatives of his, so I understand this desire) and his desire to do better than his previous novels when it comes to the writing of Black and disadvantaged characters. This book really should have been about anyone but Fern, whose perspective only really gives you an everywoman account of what takes place. I wouldn't even call the underwritten aspects of the Black and disadvantaged characters an -ism, because the main character is also underwritten.
In general, this book feels like a novella stretched to fit a novel's length. There's a lot of filling, a lot of the plot not progressing for convenient reasons (for example, there's a magic book that only shows important information when the main characters 'need' it; conveniently, they only get it this info once a huge amount of time has ticked down, forcing conflict after chapters and chapters where very little happens that progresses the plot or deepens characterization). Reading the afterward and finding out that the first two drafts of this book didn't even have the titular witches really makes sense; they frequently feel misplaced, and they disappear from the story for huge swaths of time.
This book feels extremely sophomoric for a writer of Hendrix's caliber, and I don't mean that in the sense that he's a perfect writer with no flaws; I mean that his previous two novels-- which I really, really loved-- are head and shoulders above this one in terms of craft. (You can weigh the merits of his attempts at representation for yourself.) While I have other gripes with this book*, those are very much my personal feelings, which is fine, because in the end, this book isn't made for me. It kind of feels bad, I guess, because his previous books were, but I can get over that.
If you want a very quirky and slightly twee story that is very light on actual horror (except for all the gore), this is a great book for you, especially if you want a story about the power of female friendship, motherhood, and a very well researched period drama.
*
Also I just hated the epilogue, but I can tell that's a personal feeling and half because it's pages and pages of italics. As a dyslexic: don't do that shit to me.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Sexism, and Vomit
Minor: Child abuse and Rape
Intense and graphic birthing scenes.