Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, by Grady Hendrix

[rachelmanija]

A group of pregnant teenagers at a home for unwed mothers in 1970 learn witchcraft. Sounds pretty awesome, right?

The home is miserable and emotionally abusive. They're slut-shamed constantly, made to work like Cinderella, and banned from doing anything entertaining. There's a ton of horrific medical abuse. The girls are all given fake names and banned from telling each other their real names or anything about their real life. They all - every one of them - obey this absolutely, with the exception of a few slips. (VERY improbable! Not a single one of them says "Screw this, when we're in private you can call me Linda.") Their babies are sold to adoptive parents. Girls who want to keep their babies are threatened with everything from homelessness to being locked up for life in an asylum until they give them up. But then one of them gets a book on witchcraft...

Based on the premise, I thought this would be about the girls banding together to get revenge on their abusers and forge better lives for themselves.

Haha nope! It's 80% pregnancy/abuse misery, 15% pregnant girls being exploited by witches, and 5% MAX pregnant girls doing anything for themselves including revenge.

I am not big on pregnancy in fiction. I did love the premise, but I assumed it would more about pregnancy being the thing that trapped the girls in a bad situation, and less about the physical details of pregnancy. It is EXTREMELY about the physical details of pregnancy. It has the most graphic birth scene I have ever read, and that includes in literal guides to childbirth.

I was really surprised by how little witchcraft there is. It doesn't even get introduced until about a quarter of the way in, when one of the girls gets a book on witchcraft from a librarian who is also a witch. Then there's a ton of time before they actually try a spell. Then, after they do a very successful spell - that they even use a blinded study on to make sure it's not a coincidence - all but one of the girls lose all interest in witchcraft and there's no more spells for ages. I think there's only three spells done in the entire (long) book.

Given the emphasis on how incredibly bored the girls are and how much they hate the people running the home, AND that the one spell they master is a very versatile one (Turnabout - give something you're experiencing to another person), this seems less in-character and more like Hendrix really didn't want to write the witchcraft, much as an erotica author might think, "Oh God, not another sex scene."

The afterword mentions that the first two drafts of the book did not have witches. That explains a lot. The book is mostly an expose on the horrific injustices done to pregnant teenagers pre-Roe (very earnest - Hendrix got the idea because this happened to two women in his family - but bordering on misery porn as a reading experience), plus tacked-on witches.

The witches/witchcraft elements are very inconsistent, as if Hendrix didn't know exactly what he wanted to do with them. The book on witchcraft has the kind of sisterhood and female empowerment rhetoric that was what I expected Witchcraft for Wayward Girls to be about, but the librarian-led coven (which wrote the witchcraft book) is a rag-tag group of basically homeless women who mostly seem pathetic and whose only interest in the pregnant girls is using the most powerful one for their own selfish ends.

Sometimes witchcraft seems very powerful, sometimes it seems useless. The pregnant girls are mostly not interested in using it, and have no imagination in terms of what they might be able to use it for. At one point they have spells they could use to turn invisible, fly, etc, and they don't even bother to try them because there's no spell that fits a very specific goal they have -- without even considering trying out the magic they do have as part of an overall plan to accomplish their goal! They keep saying it's pointless to do magic because it can't get them money and a home, but some of the spells actually could do that, if they were willing to say invisibly rob a bank.

In general, the depiction of witchcraft is very negative. Most of what we see involves exploitation, self-mutilation, and general misery. The pregnant girls are miserable, but the witches are also miserable. The Magical Negro cook who helps out the white girls (the one black girl renounces witchcraft very early on) uses magic to fight the witches, but doesn't consider herself a witch and thinks magic is evil (I guess except the magic she uses? very inconsistent!)

The big spell Rose uses that demands a big sacrifice doesn't even need to be the big sacrifice spell! They already have Turnabout, which inflicts your pain on another. Rose specifically wants to inflict her pain on another. So why not just use Turnabout?

Why doesn't Rose even try using magic to get her baby back? That's what she really wants!

At the end, we learn that Holly was able to use magic to get her abuser to publicly confess to sexually abusing children, and he went to jail. That's an idea that occurred to me immediately, so why did it never occur to any of the girls?

If the witches can TURN INVISIBLE, why not sneak into a bank vault and slowly accumulate enough money to BUY A HOUSE?



The overall attitude to witchcraft is both inconsistent and annoying. The end implies that it's a metaphor for female empowerment, but nothing in the rest of the book supports that. Most of the time, the witches are evil or pathetic or both. When the protagonist finally has her baby, she thinks that bringing life into the world is the REAL magic that puts witchcraft to shame BARF FOREVER.

If you want a book where teenage girls get revenge and the upper hand, 99% of the book is not that. Also, the word "pregnant" is used about 5000 times, or maybe it just felt that way.

I generally like Grady Hendrix on women's issues, but WOW was this one a miss.

Content notes: Told not shown child sexual abuse. Upsetting depictions of medical abuse, emotional abuse, misogyny, slut-shaming, self-mutilation, and forcibly separating mothers from babies. THREE extremely graphic and horrifying birthing scenes. An absolutely classic Magical Negro. Pervasive and graphic pregnancy details.