WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS is Grady Hendrix's best novel so far. This is for several reasons. Sure, setting the story in a Pre-Roe and still segregated South helps with his messaging. There is just enough distance to comfortably declare that what happens is the past and things are better now. Yet, there is plenty of uncertainty today around women's rights, especially medical. This uncertainty creates a frisson of discomfort while reading. 

To that, he layers on the fantastical elements of the story. He uses characters, one generation removed from enslavement and their strong belief system in Hoodooism, to build an atmosphere where it is difficult to separate fantasy and fiction, real and magic. Nothing of what the girls experience is implausible. If anything, you can logically explain every "otherworldly" scene in the book. But that setting, summer in the Deep South, living in an old plantation, a Mammy-like figure who is just as likely to smack you as help you but who firmly believes in magic, it all converges into a film that blurs the finest of details and makes the impossible possible.

If that weren't enough, Mr. Hendrix uses the real-life historical horrors of being unmarried and pregnant in the early seventies. While it is easy to say you understand the pressures women faced to remain "pure" and the depths to which society kept girls and women ignorant of simple biology. It is another thing entirely to see it happen over and over again, and that is just what Mr. Hendrix does. 

It doesn't matter the age or the fact that the girl might have a serious boyfriend. Every girl is in that home because their family cannot bear the consequences of having an unwed pregnant daughter. It doesn't matter how a girl gets pregnant in WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS. There is no such thing as rape. Every girl got pregnant simply because they were wicked or bad or promiscuous or troubled or slutty. The levels of disgust you feel from Mr. Hendrix's words are beyond expectations. 

Yet, for all those layers upon layers of the story he weaves into WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS, Mr. Hendrix's true magic lays in the mirror he holds up to the hypocrisy of a patriarchal, Christian, and righteous society. The only allies the girls have are each other and the one or two individuals they meet who do not conform to the patriarchal and Christian parts of that society. The girls face anger, disgust, condescension, fear, and a shit-ton of mansplaining almost every minute of every day, and therein lies the true horror of the story. It is not in the supernatural and scary parts of the story. It is in the fact that girls really did experience that smugness of religious "purity" and that we are one small step away from having to endure it all again. 

I could go on to say how I loved how Mr. Hendrix played around with the narrator, sliding seamlessly from one point of view to another as the main character drifted into and around the action. I could say that the feelings Mr. Hendrix brings to the story are so vivid and so extreme that my stomach gets upset just thinking about certain scenes (SO. MUCH. ANGER. Deserved but still.)  In the end, what makes WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS so impressive a story is that you could take away the witch stuff and it would still be a horror story. Because men have always been more vicious and crueler than any mythical beast, and they do so with smiles on their faces and benevolence in their hearts.  

WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS was, for me, a novel that devoured me as much as I devoured it. The story took me in and spat me out, emotionally drained and terrified. Terrified of the past and what women went through simply to give birth, let alone if you were a teen mom-to-be. Petrified of a future that sees those sentiments, the ignorance, and the lack of agency arise again. Powerful. Masterful. WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS is a must-read for all.