I feel like maybe it would've just been easier to love your sons?

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is a somewhat misleadingly-titled, harrowing, gothic story based on the real experiences of pregnant teenage girls in the 1970s, in a pre Roe vs Wade USA.

First of all, a note on the author. Grady Hendrix, if you are unaware as I was, is a cis male author. Certainly not the kind of person you would expect to tackle this topic, and it might even make you bristle, thinking a male horror author would use women's suffering for content. However, in the Acknowledgments at the end of this book, Hedrix states that the inspiration for WFWG came about when he discovered multiple female family members had bee sent to homes for unwed mothers in their youth, and then decided to process that via the medium of writing. He also mentions the research/reading he did, including The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler, and Wake Up Little Susie by Rickie Solinger, the latter to better understand 'How homes worked for black unwed mothers' (more on that later). He also consulted multiple MDs, Ob/Gyns, and those in his life who had given birth. All of this is to say that I don't believe Hendrix is using birth and female trauma for the sake of horror. It feels like it was written intentionally, and with a focus on allyship.

In contrast to the above, if you are expecting a bone chilling horror...don't. The witchcraft in this book plays an incredibly minor element to the main plot, which is just the continued and repeated suffering of the girls. A few casual edits could flip the genre from horror to literary--though i don't think that is a bad thing. Actually i think the bad thing was making this a horror at all.

Hendrix made me squirm multiple times in this book, but it was never cheap, and he never made the female body the butt of the joke. A lot of the 'action' scenes are told in a very neutral, clinical way, and that in itself, addressing the brutal reality of unmedicated and/or overmedicated birth, along with instances of period-typical misogyny and some egregious but non fantastical medical malpractice, is enough in itself to get your heart rate up.

Hendrix lays bare the reality so many girls faced, and still face today. He captures the feeling of dismissal and powerlessness, and the ways that disenfranchised girls claw back agency and rebel in whatever ways they can. What's more, is I don't think there is a single point in this book in which there is a 'correct' choice to make. There are choices made, and maybe they're not good ones, but having the freedom to choose means accepting the possibility of choosing wrong.

However, there are parts of this book which are severely lacking.

Hendrix took the time in the Acknowledgments to specifically mention he had done reading on the black female experience in homes for unwed mothers. There are 3 black characters in this book. Two adults (sisters) and one pregnant teen. There is...some kind of attempt to talk about racism, but falls to the wayside early on, and then disappears altogether when one of the pregnant girls who was the only one who had anything to say about it leaves halfway through. Zinnia's experience in the home is indistinguishable from the other (white) girls, other than occasionally being referred to as 'coloured'. Hagar, one of the adult black women, is similarly underdeveloped, and I would argue only exists to get the girls out of various binds with her special know-how (and that is a very, very tired trope).

There was a point in this book in which our main character had the chance to kill a very bad man and get away with it, but chooses not to. Killing this man would have also alleviated the suffering of another girl, which was the primary plot motivation. One of the only times a girl had an opportunity to take direct action against one of their abusers, and the FMC to chose that moment to get on her high horse!? In the end, no girls really get a happy ending--bittersweet at best. Is that true to life? Yes. Was that fun to read after 500 pages of trauma? No.

This book is highly emotional, empathetic, traumatic and at times, gory. It is not perfect, but it is a wild ride.

Trigger warnings: Pedophilia/Rape (implied/mentioned), Sexual assault (moderate/flashback), child abuse (Moderate/flashback), racism, misogyny, detailed medical procedures, detailed description of birth, blood/gore, medical malpractice. Read with caution!