Book Review: The Bewitching

Spoilers!

I recently read a novel about mermaids in a present, crime context (The Hidden), and now, I’ve read a book about witches also within a modern context. And it’s delightful. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2025 book, The Bewitching, is a story about class and status, generational trauma, and yes, witches. Set in New England, which is of course well-known for witch lore, Moreno-Garcia infuses the New England witch lore with Mexican witch lore for a creepy, brutal kind of witch/warlocks and bewitchments.

Moreno-Garcia’s book is a story told across three time periods: Minerva in 1998, who is a graduate student in New England at the fictional Stoneridge, working on her thesis about witches and the macabre (she’s particularly interested in the unsung female horror writer from the 1930s, Beatrice Tremblay); Minerva’s grandmother, Alba, in 1908, who is trying to live up to her mother’s idea of a “lady” on a farm in the Mexican countryside; and 1934, written from Beatrice’s perspective of her friend, Virginia, or Ginny’s, disappearance from Stoneridge back when it was a women-only university. The connective tissue of these periods is the bewitchment that befuddled each of these women. If there was no supernatural element, or witches and warlocks, what Minerva, Alba, and Ginny experience is eerily reminiscent of depression symptoms. They are lonely, isolating themselves, and find it difficult to get out of bed in the mornings. Combined with the paranoia of thinking they were being stalked by witches (which turned out to be true!), I kept thinking about one of my all-time favorite songs “Wolves” by Phosphorescent:

“Mama, there’s wolves in the house

And mama, they won’t let me out

And mama, they’re mating at night

And mama, they won’t make nice

They’re pacing and glowing bright

Their faces all snowy and white

Bury their paws in the stone

They make for my heart as their home”

I’ve always interpreted the song as about depression (the wolves are the depression), but interestingly, this song also works well to describe what actually is transpiring in the book: the bewitching of these women and their families by the witches and warlock! They are outside the house acting menacingly, glowing bright green, not making nice, and they absolutely want to “make for my heart as their home.” Which is to say, Moreno-Garcia’s witches are brutal; they suck your blood and eat your heart. They’re almost vampiric in that way.

Given the title of the book, obviously I expected the book to fully realize the concept of witches instead of it all being a metaphor about depression and loneliness. To that end then, I started wondering, who are the witches and/or warlocks?! In Alba’s time, her suave, refined, and cultured uncle, Arturo, comes to visit. Despite this being her uncle, Alba is clearly smitten by him. Red flag! I immediately suspected him of being a warlock. His motive was all too human, though: money and love. He wanted to get Alba’s brother out of the way, so he could sell the farm, and he wanted Alba to himself. For Ginny, which also crosses generations into Minerva’s time, I strongly suspected Carolyn. Carolyn comes from a very rich factory family and stubbornly always gets her way with Beatrice and Ginny as a college student. Minerva interacts with Carolyn, in her 80s now, inasmuch as Carolyn is the repository of Ginny’s writings. She’s still stubborn and hoity-toity. And as such, she had the most malevolent potential to me.

I was right! Arturo is a warlock and Carolyn is a witch. Arturo killed Alba’s brother and her would-be lover. Carolyn killed Ginny and killed Timothy, another student writing his thesis in Minerva’s time shortly before the events of the book. Arturo is coming after Alba and Carolyn is coming after Minerva because they both possess special, strong blood, owing to their own power as possessors of portents. The class and status metaphor is readily apparent then: Arturo and Carolyn are both upper class individuals who disdain anyone in a station below them, including their own family members. Generationally, Alba clearly experienced trauma from her 1908 experience until her death shortly before Minerva is a graduate student.

What ends up warding off Arturo and Carolyn, respectively, allowing Alba and Minerva to chop their heads off, is playing into their unyielding, insatiable hunger and arrogance for more. Alba and Minerva both sort of lulled each into that trap to their peril and demise. As uh, macabre, as this sounds, it was quite satisfying when Arturo and Carolyn lost their heads!

I greatly enjoyed Moreno-Garcia’s book because witches and warlocks, even though these are brutal ones, are fun, and the time hopping made for a lively read. All throughout, Minerva, Alba, and Ginny were heroic figures that I rooted for as a reader despite the people around them doubting the veracity of what they were experiencing (maybe something to be said for that with respect to gender norms, class again, and so forth). I can’t wait to circle back and read Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, which really seemed to bring her to the forefront over the past half-decade.