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

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As they travel we get to know Lux’s past and we meet many different and colourful characters who to me felt almost like; ghosts. The plot was so compelling, the pacing perfect, it just flowed beautifully, exactly what I’d expect from Kirsty Logan and her skilful writing.

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. I think one of the scariest points of the book was when one of the kitchen girls was not allowed to be around or tend the food because she was on her period and her unholiness would spoil the food.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. Lux’s fate, though, lies elsewhere, up north where “blue glaciers cast up glassy and gleaming on a shore of black sand”. 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.

It will definitely go down as one of my top reads of the year, and possibly one of my all-time favourites too. 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. The importance of choice and desire are at the centre of this story, things that these women were either denied or given very little of. From the past perspective of lux I found the writing style of no capital letters or full stops really difficult to get through and lost the flow of the book.

A very different sort of man is “the size of a bull, and his smell was so strong it felt like fingers forced into her nostrils”.

The story tells of Lux, alone and suspected of witchcraft after her mother’s death, when she meets the mysterious Else, who may or may not be a real witch. 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. It's a very stylish and competent read -- I've read a few things by Kirsty Logan before and never really enjoyed them, but I've always appreciated their ability to string together words in a compelling way. The emphasis here is on storytelling, not just in Logan’s approach to her material but through an intricate exploration of roles on offer to women like Lux accused of witchcraft and devoid of social or economic clout - the parts she’s forced to play, and who gets to tell her story. Anyway, Logan dips her toes into that myth, her main character being a herbalist and abortionist, but manages to craft a story that does justice to the horrors of witch hunts and the disempowered position women held in medieval societies that never feels exaggerated.It’s not a rehashed version of another witch trial, it’s taking the notion of witches and demonstrating the roles women have been forced to play for centuries, and the level of violence and scorn thrown their way by men and society throughout history. I'm very pleased to say that I loved the writing again here, but I found the storyline equally palatable. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The soft, silky, slippery gift of the Earth, which is being twisted, bent and broken, dried out, cracked so many times.