Now She is Witch: ‘Myth-making at its best‘ Val McDermid

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Now She is Witch opens with a the stark image of our protagonist Lux burying the remains of her mother in a poison garden.

Not just as a person who is always trying to heal and learn from everything around her, but as an artist. A brilliant stand-alone story to read on cold, wintery nights with the wind howling and the rain pouring outside. to the right of their own function and the choice and forge of their own fate and future with their wisdom that comes from the biggest goddess of all; Mother Earth. She is beyond salvation and nothing can be done to save her or her soul, that is until one day when Else finds her alone in the woods. 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.Kirsty Logan shows the limited choices left to these women, and draws the reader into their struggles to take control of their own lives. The mummers sections had a "Midsummer Nights Dream" feel about it, and loved the way that they were a band of waifs and strays. Die Zwischenparts mit Lux' und Elses Geschichte waren teils mühsam, aber am Ende kam alles rund zusammen. Not even to mention the beautiful circularity of the story, and the way that shards from the first page fall into place and are mirrored once we reach the ending.

I have to admit to now becoming a little tired of novels about witches - but I love was Kirsty has done here. The realness of all these elements, in conjunction with the magical atmosphere of the setting and prose, made Lux’s story hit home all the harder. On a technical level, she keeps getting stronger and stronger with every release, and Now She is Witch is near perfection. I couldn’t help but feel the heavy burden on my chest when I realised; nothing much had changed since then. It’s little wonder that for a time Lux, who as the novel progresses becomes in turn an actor on a frozen stage, a servant in a hall of delicacies, a food-taster to a lord and companion to a fine lady, is tempted to turn her back on Else’s revenge and set her own dreams of finding freedom in the wild country aside.As a lover of witches, female rage, revenge murder, gender neutrality, matriarchy, and the word ‘cunt,’ this was good as hell. The plot in general is quite mysterious, strung together in a way that means you can’t quite tell what is truth and what is metaphor. Near the beginning of Kirsty Logan’s fine new novel, a travelling theatre company stages a nocturnal performance on a frozen lake. Kirsty Logan is the author of three novels, three story collections, a memoir, two chapbooks, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, and several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

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. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Throughout the book, people retell their stories back to them, twisting them so the women become the villains, seductresses, witches.It's a dark story, and some truly vile and horrible things happen to the women in this book, but it never strays into gender-essentialist territory, which is what I usually loathe about those witchy feminist stories. When the local village men come upon her house in the woods, claiming to be in need of tinctures, but clearly there to satisfy their other needs, a stranger named Else appears, alongside a wolf.

Again, this is hard to explain, and all I can really do is tell you to read it to find out, but there’s something magical about it, combined with the occasionally experimental nature of it (there are entire sections which are someone telling their part of the story, for example), which adds to the folktale feeling. This is outstanding: a world that runs parallel to our own, full of the graceless hypocrisies of men and the petty (and not-so-petty) cruelties of disempowered women. okay so i'm usually not big on fantasy books but i wanted to give this one a chance as it has such strong feminist and queer subtext but i honestly wish i hadn't.In this witch story unlike any other, Lux and Else join forces to take their revenge on a powerful man. Whether Logan is describing a dismembered bear whose lopped-off parts are handed out as favours at a banquet, or a gory flagellant’s parade, the images we are offered snap and sizzle with portent and possibility. Kirsty Logan's mesmerising and evocative novel represents an imaginative triumph in this new subgenre [of "witch lit"]. This beautifully, dark story sees Lux go through her darkest moments, with parts of the novel being written with no punctuation, as Lux talks to Else about her past, her trauma and what led her to where she was at the beginning of the book. One of our national writing treasures , Kirsty Logan's latest tale is a deeply atmospheric , sometimes gory but ultimately uplifting .