The magic in all of us in face of tragedy

‘They said she was wayward. They said it was all her fault. They said she had done something wrong. They lied.’ The plural forces of a misogynistic system lined up against the individual woman who is the object of sentences uttered against her is the real horror of Grady Hendrix’s apt new novel, in which the core is not the supernatural, but the magic that lies within each female body and the tenderness a writer can evoke for his beautifully realised and individuated characters in a story where repression and shame effloresce into tragic and beautiful rebellion.

It is 1970 and Neva is on her way to Florida with a father whose silent incandescence reverberates with the message he had laid out before the story began: ‘It would be better if she was dead’. Why? Because Neva is 15, unmarried, and pregnant. She is, in a word (because words don’t belong to girls; they belong to a patriarchal system working ‘to convince us that the most natural thing in the world was evil’), ‘wayward’. Naturally, such waywardness can only be dealt with through the combination of secrecy and physical and psychological abuse that forms the doubtless lucrative basis of Wellwood House, home for wayward girls, to which Neva is delivered ‘for a single purpose, which is to shed your sin and face your future’ – a future in which her baby is given up for adoption and she returns to an existence in which the most momentous event of her life can never be acknowledged.

Stripped of their names, their histories, their babies, and any semblance of control, the four central characters, Fern (Neva), Rose, Zinnia and Holly are given a way to, ostensibly, reclaim some control and the ability to fight back when a mysterious librarian gives Fern a book: ‘How to be a Groovy Witch’. When the silly-sounding volume proves capable of transferring Zinnia’s unacknowledged morning sickness to Wellwood House’s callous ob/gyn, the girls are faced with what seems like an easy choice: keep living their powerless, subjugated lives, or take ‘the power you need to solve your problems’. When they make the obvious and necessary choice, however, they realise that it is not just the forces of man that wish to control them.

Ultimately, as they battle for their futures, what the girls come to learn in ways that are both tragic and empowering, is that ‘the miracle that passed all understanding’ is nothing else but the miracle of childbirth. The power to command when and how and with whom and why to have a child is the power for which Grady Hendrix so compellingly advocates. It is a power worth reading about, and worth fighting for.