Arts & Culture
Witchy Reads for a Happy Ending: The Herbwitch’s Apprentice
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Beatrix Kondo reviews the first book in the Witches of Olderea series by Ireen Chau. “Think Jane Austen crashing a Barbie movie, if Barbie could accidentally hex a prince.”
Arts & Culture
One Wish, No Refunds: What Obsession Borrows from the Craft It Doesn’t Practice
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“Film audiences have spent all summer describing Obsession a story about the dangers of witchcraft,” writes Beatrix Kondo. “Nothing in it, however, has anything to do with sorcery. What Bear does? That’s shopping.”
Arts & Culture
The First Spell Is Silence: The Pagan Question of Withheld Knowledge
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“Almost every magical system in fiction has a rule about who is allowed to learn,” writes Beatrix Kondo. “What has been remarkable about fantasy over the past few decades is how many of those systems have stopped pretending this rule is natural.”
Arts & Culture
The Ink Has Always Been There: the Grammar of Exclusion in “Witch Hat Atelier”
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Beatrix Kondo examines Witch Hat Atelier, a manga and anime set in a world where magic is a craft that can be learned by anyone but has been carefully suppressed as “something you have to be born with” – and what that premise might say to modern Witches.
Arts & Culture
Caged and Dissected: The Witch Hunt Politics of “Thorn Season”
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“‘Shadow and Bone meets The Selection,'” the marketing promises, banking on glittering courts and will-they-won’t-they tension,” writes Beatrix Kondo in her analysis of the romantasy sensation. “What the book actually delivers is something else entirely—the first chapters of a feminist high fantasy saga with a queer and Pagan reading.”