Book Review- Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

Summary:

There’s power in a book…
They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.
Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.
Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

What I Thought:

Teen Moms circa 1970s Meets the Craft

I am most blown away by the incredible accuracy in which Hendrix depicts, not just pregnancy, but all the gritty details of being a teen girl in the 1970s. For a man to take on the voice of Fern says much for his bravery but add twenty pounds in the heat of summer to a babymill… someone needs to check if Mr. Hendrix is okay.

Because a babymill is exactly what Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is all about. The shame, the loneliness, and the horror of all autonomy stripped away at such a young age is a gross display of power that the author paints with such empathy and care. With distinct voices all screaming the same horror whilst simultaneously coping in different ways, this novel is a thoughtful narrative to women’s rights to live.

The story starts with a long introduction to the setting and characters but let me tell you what snowballed into a hurricane of trauma and triggers made me thankful for the steady march toward confrontation.

I never give spoilers in my reviews, but this book made me seek support from friends who’d also read it. We raged. We cried. We rallied. By the end, I wanted to sing the praises of Grady Hendrix and at the same time burn it all to the ground.

If you’re looking for a book to make you feel something. This is it. So far, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is my book of the year for 2025.

About the Author: (I didn’t write this)

Like gravity, or ugly people, Grady Hendrix is hard to escape, especially on his website. In this place, he is all up in your areas and he even wrote the words that you are reading right now. When you are on his website, he can see you. He can see you right now.

Grady Hendrix writes fiction, also called “lies,” and he writes non-fiction, which people sometimes accidentally pay him for. He is the author of Horrorstör, the only novel about a haunted Scandinavian furniture store you’ll ever need. It has been translated into 14 languages and is being turned into a movie. His novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism, is set in his hometown and is all about demonic possession, friendship, exorcism, and the Eighties — it’s basically Beaches meets The Exorcist and it caused the Wall Street Journal to call him “a national treasure” and received rave reviews from everyone from Kirkus to Southern Living. Surprisingly, this is still not enough for him to earn his mother’s love.

Still trying to prove himself to his family, he also wrote Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom in the Seventies and Eighties. It was so popular it won a Stoker Award, and while you may not know what that is, trust me when I say that it is a big, big deal that gets Grady 20% off all purchases at the Franklin Mint. His next novel was We Sold Our Souls, a heavy metal take on the Faust legend, which hit bookstores in 2018 and got selected as one of the best books of 2018 by Library Journal, the Chicago Public library, and, finally, his mom. It’s also one of Locus’s recommended novels of 2018 and earned him an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books that makes him sound like some kind of smart person or something. He’s not.

Desperate for his mother to love him more than his sisters, his next book was the New York Times bestseller, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, once again set in the neighborhood where he grew up. Then he wrote his best-selling ode to slasher movies, The Final Girl Support Group, followed by one more book set in his old neighborhood, How To Sell a Haunted House. At this point, he is not allowed to write any more books set in Charleston or he has to start paying Charleston a licensing fee.

Grady Hendrix used to be a journalist, which means that he was completely irrelevant and could be killed and turned into food at any time. He is one of the founders of the New York Asian Film Festival, but he is not responsible for the bad parts of it. He is also not Asian. For years he was a regular film critic for the New York Sun but then it went out of business. He has written for Playboy Magazine, Slate, The Village Voice, the New York Post, Film Comment, and Variety. He has a hard time making up his mind.

He recently wrote These Fists Break Bricks about kung fu movies coming to America in the ‘70s & ‘80s, and he also wrote a science fiction book called Occupy Space about an astronaut stranded on the International Space Station. He promises he had nothing to do with astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore being stranded on the ISS and he would never engage in that kind of publicity stunt. A long time ago he wrote a Satan Loves You which he self-published. It has since gone out of print but he’s working hard to get it back on the market. Please do not pay $1,000 for a copy. Along with his BFF from high school, Katie Crouch, he is the co-author of the YA series, The Magnolia League. He co-authored Dirt Candy: A Cookbook, the first graphic novel cookbook in America, with his wife and Ryan Dunlavey. It’s now in its seventh printing which means that at least 24 people have bought a copy. His fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Pseudopod, and the anthology, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination.

He is very, very beautiful, but if you ever meet him, please do not let this make you uncomfortable. He does not judge.

The New Yorker once ran a short profile of him, and this means that when the time comes and they are lining people up for the Space Arks he will be guaranteed a seat ahead of you.

I love reading, and at times I find myself able to take on free book reviews for friends and acquaintances. If you wouild like me to consider reviewing your book, I encourage you to reach out. I cannot take on many projects at once, but I promise to consider your request.