(It is a long time
since I have read an Alice Hoffman novel, and there is no doubt that she can
tell a pacy, clever story. Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The
Witness)
If you are born with an extra finger on one hand, your blood
is black, you can’t drown and you are being followed around by crows, then, in
Alice Hoffman’s world, you are a witch.
Fans of the author of her The Witches of Cambridge will of course know this. Hoffman has made the witchy world her own in fiction, and here she is introducing a new cast of witches in a novel which is set in the 1950s world of Radcliffe College, now a part of Harvard but at the time an adjunct where women could receive a university education but without distracting the men. However, of course, Massachusetts had an earlier history with witches, having been the site of the notorious witch trials of the late 17th Century.
One of the residences at Radcliffe is Lilith House, a very secret society where only witches go. And when the novel opens, two new students are invited to join – Ava, a country girl from Maine and Lauren, a wealthy local. Their backgrounds are very different, as are their characters, but of course they have one major similarity. And they become close to each other – at least for some of the time – and their lives become intertwined.
Lilith House may be a comfortable bolt hole for the young witches, but not all goes smoothly. Like most university students, their love-lives take up quite a lot of their time, and do not always go according to plan. But things also seem to be going strangely at Lilith House when senior students suddenly vanish just before their graduation. And they all had some part of their studies in common.
Then Ava finds diaries that date back to the time of the witch trials of the 17th Century, which seem to have links to the 1950s witchery of Ava and Lauren – and show that being a witch may well be a genetic inheritance. These historical sections add an interesting dimension to the novel. However, Hoffman’s linking of the early witch trials to the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s sometimes seems a little clumsy. Lauren’s brother – also a witch, of course – is gay, and in Senator McCarthy’s world, gay people had to be hunted down and dealt with. And so that becomes a dimension of the plot as well.
It is a long time since I have read an Alice Hoffman novel, and there is no doubt that she can tell a pacy, clever story, though I am not sure I would describe it as bewitching. Her fans will probably love it, but I’m still not going to be checking out people’s hands when I meet them for signs of an extra finger.- Margaret von Klemperer
The Witches of Cambridge is published by Scribner: ISBN 978-1-3985-6530-2
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