Review: Witchcraft for Wayward Girls - Grady Hendrix - January 2025 Set against the haunting backdrop of a 1970s unwed mothers home in St. Augustine, Florida, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is Grady Hendrix at his most chilling—and most heartbreaking. Combining the author’s signature horror-tinged storytelling with a devastating slice of social history, this novel struck an especially personal chord with me. Like the girls in this story, my own mother had her child taken from her as a teenager under the guise of “what’s best,” a story so many women in that era know too well. We follow 15-year-old Fern, frightened, pregnant, and utterly alone as she enters the rigid confines of the Wellwood Home. Girls like Fern are labelled “loose” and “troubled,” stripped of their autonomy and made to follow a life path dictated by shame and control. But what begins as a bleak narrative of conformity slowly morphs into something powerful, strange—and even a little magical. When a mysterious Mobile Libra...

The Vardo Witch Trials At the end of last year, a new book was published and being advertised on bookstagram and social media that caught my interest as it was loosely based on the true story of the Vardo Witch Trials. The book was called The Mercies by Kiren Millwood Hargrave and takes the readers to the island of Vardo where readers will be able to experience the Vardo storm and the witch trials of 1621. This book is told through the POV’s of Maren, one of Vardo’s women, and Ursa who was the wife of the Commander that sent the police to the village. As someone who loved the Salem Witch Trials and reading about it, I was intrigued as I hadn’t heard about this particular trial and reading more about it – it was one of Norway’s worst-ever trials and one of history’s mass executions of females. The drama started on Christmas Eve in 1617 in a small town called Finnmark. That night there was a fateful storm – one of the worst in history and killed 40 of the townsmen of Vardo within...