Now She is Witch: ‘Myth-making at its best‘ Val McDermid
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Now She is Witch: ‘Myth-making at its best‘ Val McDermid
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Description
At one crucial moment, in an observation that might serve as an apt comment on the novel as a whole, the lady Lux has been serving says of stories: “Each person is stuffed full to bursting with them, fat as pigs ready for a feast.
It’s a moment of grace and vindication, one that Logan lets the long-suffering Lux experience utterly, triumphantly alone. The book contains some very dark and harrowing content, and seems wound around the concepts of womanhood and personhood and all the insidious little parts of society along the way. I truly, truly highly recommend this book to everyone who needs some magic in their life or just a green light to finally be who they are. The book also has enough action to keep you on your toes, while the other chapters; where the author takes the reader to reminisce about her characters’ past are long enough to slow your speeding heart rate a little.A very different sort of man is “the size of a bull, and his smell was so strong it felt like fingers forced into her nostrils”. This book is mostly dark, tense and somehow claustrophobic, absolutely crammed with atmosphere, and it's pretty much everything I'd like a book with witches in to be.
The relationship between Lux and Else was very carefully done, and there was a real slice of humanity to be found in so many of the various characters Lux falls into step with along the way. Now She is Witch has me sleeping easy again in the knowledge that I can keep my self-appointed position as chair of the unofficial Kirsty Logan fanclub. Near the beginning of Kirsty Logan’s fine new novel, a travelling theatre company stages a nocturnal performance on a frozen lake. This is a book where you sit down to review it and end up having to ask yourself, how do I even start to describe it? Now She is Witch is a beautiful, atmospheric, resonant tale that follows Lux and Else as they fight to be heard and to tell their own stories.Having lost not just her mother, but her home and roots to accusations of witchcraft, Lux sets of on a journey into the woods. Her work has been optioned for TV, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. The synopsis of the story is fairly straightforward -- Luz, a young woman, thrown from a monastery she never chose to go to, is chased out of her hometown by odious townsfolk accusing her of witchcraft.
Now She Is Witch is a beautiful and twisted dark tale of feminine power in a time when a woman with power was deemed to be in league with the devil. i don't know why the author felt the need to mention fecal matters so many times but it felt extremely out of place. I HATE the myth of the female herbalist/midwife/abortionist who only tried to help the poor villagers and then gets murdered because men hate women with agency.For Lux and Else trail the weighty plumes of traumatic pasts, which Logan skilfully offers us in passages of backstory that sing, screech and skip through the novel in the way records are marked by jagged scratches. Kirsty Logan's mesmerising and evocative novel represents an imaginative triumph in this new subgenre [of "witch lit"]. The littlest prick and all those stories will simply explode out, shrieking like fat in a fire, and anyone nearby can hear it all. That’s where this book touched my aching burning forehead and brought me cool relief with its icy long fingers; the only thing I ever have to be; is myself. Anyway, Logan dips her toes into that myth, her main character being a herbalist and abortionist, but manages to craft a story that does justice to the horrors of witch hunts and the disempowered position women held in medieval societies that never feels exaggerated.
Any who assume agency are swiftly denounced and brutally dealt with: those labelled witches are tied to poles in the sea and left to slowly drown; others guilty of lesser offences (talking too much, too loudly or indeed at all) are paraded around in scold’s bridles, torture devices deployed to humiliate. It's a very stylish and competent read -- I've read a few things by Kirsty Logan before and never really enjoyed them, but I've always appreciated their ability to string together words in a compelling way. Although Logan’s take on it strikes some of the same beats, she made it feel fresher, darker and yet more tender than any I’ve read before. Lux’s fate, though, lies elsewhere, up north where “blue glaciers cast up glassy and gleaming on a shore of black sand”. From the snowy winter woods to the bright midnight sun; from lost and powerless to finding your path, Now She is Witch conjures a world where women grasp at power through witchcraft, sexuality and performance, and sometimes by throwing each other to the wolves.This is one of the most "modern" examinations of a very real historical phenomena that I've read -- it thrives on the vagueness of its setting, neither a historical fiction nor a fantastic allegory. But when I say every cell in my body was shivering, shrieking and went into a max frenzy just like Sandra Bullock in Practical Magic when I heard the owl, That Owl, under my window I’m not even exaggerating. In the harsh world of Now She Is Witch, which would seem to be some version of medieval Europe, most girls and women are possessions for men either to harm or play with. Throughout the book, people retell their stories back to them, twisting them so the women become the villains, seductresses, witches.
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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