Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

Listen, I'm not someone who thinks authors should only write about people who share their experiences or identity, but in this case, Grady Hendrix should have stopped to ask himself whether he was the right author for this kind of story. It's disappointing because I really liked some of his female characters in other books. Unfortunately, while he is good at writing a female character in isolation, I'm realizing that he really fails to understand how women relate to each other and the world around them. In some cases, it just vaguely feels like there's something missing from how he writes female friendships, but with Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, there was nothing about any of his female characters, their interactions, or how they perceive their world that felt true. And that's a huge deal when the entire story is about a bunch of teenage girls, their relationships with each other, and how they're treated by the world. At that point, it's not just an identity thing, it's a quality of writing thing.

The narrator of the audiobook definitely didn't help. It felt like she was hamming it up the whole time and made every. single. sentence. sound like it was the worst. thing. in. the. world. Even benign descriptions are given this tone of “Isn't this the most world-shatteringly terrible thing you've ever heard?” but the text is just like, describing the view out a window. Also her voice whenever a character was yelling or crying was painfully shrill. I got to the hospital scene towards the end of the book and gave up partly because Hendrix's writing was exhausting and partly because I couldn't stand listening to the narrator shrieking.

Sorry for the extremely subjective review, but the experience of reading this book really pissed me off. Hendrix was a must-buy author for me, and I'm feeling disillusioned.