The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/category/reviews)
“A story set in Near becomes a mirror,” writes Beatrix Kondo, exploring folklore, fear, and the familiar stranger in V.E. Schwab’s novel “The Near Witch.” “What the mirror reflects is a community organized around the strategic management of its own fear.”
“Something that awestruck me is the wide variety of languages in this record,” writes Alan U. Dalul, “including German, English, Latin, Greek, Hungarian, and more. We are in deep need of diversity, of union, which this record celebrates through language and heritage.”
“We have no record from Hypatia about the circumstances of her life,” writes Meg Elison in her review of the 2009 film about the ancient Roman philosoher. “Letters written to her by men are preserved; none of her letters to them remain.”
“If you’re drawn to folkloric density, ancestral memory, visceral horror that rejects comfort, or animist logic where houses and bodies blur,” writes Cosette Paneque in her review of Irene Solà’s novel, “this has power. But know what you’re walking into.”
At Starwood Festival, psychonaut roots, Pagan-adjacent community, music, ritual, and radical hospitality converge, creating an intimate, transformative gathering where seekers, artists, and elders alike rediscover land, lineage, and the enduring feeling of coming home together.
“For contemporary practitioners of Witchcraft, the novel demands wrestling with a complicated history,” Cosette Paneque writes. “These women weren’t claiming the identity of ‘Witch.’ They were sharing knowledge, building community, exercising what small control they could over their precarious lives.”
