by Cathryn_Conroy: This is the perfect book for spooky season! Filled with witches, black apples, black roses, blackbirds, white crows (and black ones, too!), and red boots and touched with a potion of magical realism, this novel by Alice Hoffman is an unusual blend of history and fantasy.
It’s the early 1950s in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the all-women’s Radcliffe College. Ava Abbot and Lauren Bell are freshman roommates at Lilith House, an exclusive enclave of eight witches—two women chosen from each class— who are part of the Lilith Society, a secret organization of witches at Radcliffe dating back to colonial times.
Each of the women at Lilith House was born with 11 fingers, have very sharp teeth, bleed black blood, and are unable to drown no matter how deep the water. They live together in the house and practice their magic arts, not only teaching each other new spells and incantations, but also learning the right and wrong ways to use them. All of them are brilliant students.
Ava is a redheaded orphan and has a mysterious benefactor who is paying her way at Radcliffe. She grew up in the wilds of Maine, adopted by parents who owned a remote apple orchard and farm. Ava has always known she was different from others, but her parents unequivocally shut down that side of her. It was a harsh life, but moving to Cambridge is a new beginning for her. She is quiet and contemplative. One day she encounters a Harvard student and while they have testy words, both are smitten. There is just one big problem: His name is Jamie Mather, a descendant of Cotton Mather, a Puritan clergyman who was instrumental in murdering women suspected of being witches.
Bold and brash Lauren, who has long blonde-white hair, is part of the wealthy Bell family of Boston and can trace her lineage to some of the first witches to live in the commonwealth. She has an older brother, Lionel, who is in medical school, but they have been alone in this world since their parents died in a tragic accident. Lauren has been hurt so frequently that her heart is a cold stone. She is determined to never fall in love, but love finds her in a most unexpected way. Ava is her first friend, but Lauren doesn’t know how to be a friend so it’s rocky going for the two women who are so different from one another.
A secondary story is laced throughout the novel, tracing the history of witches, witch-hunts, and the murder of witches in Massachusetts from the late 1600s to the early 1700s. It is compellingly told in the first person by Rose Bridewell, the first witch of Cambridge.
Meanwhile, the threats and sinister lies surrounding the communist witch-hunt portrayed in the Joseph McCarthy hearings in Washington, D.C. are the top national headlines, mimicking the hatred and ousters that characterized the Salem witch trials some 250 years earlier.
And then something mysterious happens. Some of the women of Lilith House go missing, and no one can find them. It’s such a dire situation creating so much fear that everyone but Ava and Lauren move out of Lilith House, leaving them alone during their senior year. That is when something truly frightening happens to Ava that may drastically change her forever. Are the witch trials really a thing of the long-ago past?
While parts of the novel are repetitious and a bit slow-going, most of it is a fabulous read. In addition to being a delightful love story, it is a haunting and magical tale of strong women who are persecuted by weak and threatened men and how the women not only survive, but rise above it.
We fly together!
And good news: This is the first of a planned trilogy.
