Rüya

BOOK REVIEW 🍂🧙

The Bewitching, 3.25 ⭐️

This is an eerie story across three interconnected timelines. We follow three different women, who each battle with their own witches and solve their own mysteries. Although the book was nice, not all timelines were equally engaging and fell short on couple things.

I had a general thought while reading this book. I wish people who wrote fiction about witches and witch hunts stopped framing the problems and viole**nce around individualistic reasons disconnected from sociopolitical conditions and recognise the systematic nature the trials/figure of the witch played in bringing the new, capitalist, patriarchal world order. I haven’t read a book that handles the figure of the ‘witch’ as such. In this book as well, the witch is an isolated monster from folk tales.

Now for my comments on the different timelines:

1998 plot was for me the most interesting and atmospheric one. Yet the protagonist is one of the least sympathetic/hard to relate to characters I read in a while. The ways in which she interacts with/treats her ‘friends’ who do nothing by serve her throughout the book is especially aggravating. She treats everyone around her like an inconvenience. I didn’t like that the friends did not exist outside their relationship to her. On top of that her position as an English lit masters student was suspect as she spent the whole book acting like an investigative journalist. This is not how the writing/research process of a thesis goes, it was a bit hard to believe.

1934: This storyline had the most interesting characters and the most engaging relationships. The plot was thinner, I wish we could’ve read more about Ginny, Beatrice, and Edgar. I think their stories could’ve been explored more.

***continues in the comments