The leadership of a black woman is questioned by the other witches again and again throughout the story. The witches themselves also reflect the problems of white feminism failing to center the voices of women most particularly targeted by patriarchal violence. Moth suffers from accusatory, racially tinged questions like, “Where are you from,” despite her family having roots in the very founding of her town. Our protagonist, Moth, is a mixed race teenager who has never known her father, and whose mother’s side of the family is an utter mystery. Where this intersects with racism heavily influences the entire narrative.

This book manages to subvert this issue by calling out the inherent misogyny of these hunts, and exploring as a major theme, the deliberate erasure of history as a way to control marginalized communities and embolden those already in power.

A common problem with these stories is that they can sometimes seem to play into the narrative of witch hunts as legitimate criminal trials rather than absurd, state-sanctioned torture by suggesting that real witches were actually involved.

This book is far from the first piece of fiction rooted in early American witch hunts.

The okay witch by emma steinkellner