Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

While the tragic reality for these young underage girls and the neglect abuse and emotional trauma they endured was harrowing to read about and the impact of their pregnancies would haunt them for the rest of their lives. They had no choice no voice and no rights to their own agencies. These women wanted their babies, they didn’t want them pulled from their wombs and whisked away given to married couples who would be their parents and watch them grow up. They were forced to sign the papers to relinquishing their rights and if they didn’t they were brought to a locked down psych end of the hospital where they would be made to stay until signing the papers . The ward was so terrifying and the thought of surviving in there after barely just surviving the unwed home they were dropped off at was unbearable. They would all sign and they’d be left with the grief and loss and mental anguish that they couldn’t even discuss with anyone bc everyone they knew believed them to be elsewhere like camp over the summer or visiting an out of town relative and at 15 they didn’t want to share their shame and the horror they gave yo their own baby. The witch who becomes their way to make choices for themselves to take back some part of their lives and will was a bit fantastical with her sealed vow they now belonged to her coven and when asked they would need to do what the witch asked. She gave them hexes and spells to thwart the administration at the home they freedom to fly at night and perhaps just to imagine they had power over those who believed themselves in control of these girls and their babies lives. They didn’t have hope or even faith that their lives would ever be a thing other than the one horrible thing they’d been through and they would be unworthy and unable to relate to their peers having been through something so traumatic and painful they didn’t have much to live for as the very worst had happened and the very best of them was taken away. The characters were complex and their fear confusion betrayal and terror was related in their individual ways they’d cope and lose themselves to the despair and desolate circumstances they’d been forced into. The unusual bond that the 4 main characters shared was due to their similar situations, their inability to speak or choose for themselves and their terror of the unknown and grief for their unborn but already had parents to adopt them. When they share their more personal feelings and lives prior to arriving there that is when their bond strengthens and when they receive the book from the witch they are wary it’s another adults joke on them but they decide to try the first hex to make the doc sick bc he is so harsh, uncaring and unprofessional reminding them they are loose girls and have sinned as well as acted sexually perverse. He tells one of them she is sick and throwing up bc she was too immature to have sexual relations and now her body is making itself sick because she is unable to admit she was acting like a harlot and not making love to her boyfriend. They decide to give him her illness and let him feel the pain and the continuous suffering and projectile vomiting she’s been having since conception and it worked he was hospitalized for weeks, they put another on the matron of the home and she leaves the home and doesn’t return for weeks later as well. When the witch tells them she is dying and one of them is needed to take her place in the coven to keep the lives of all the defendants from HECATE alive within her she demands that it is flora who will do it. She refuses ans the girls find an unusual and unexpected ally in the most unlikeliest place,

Really makes you think about the oppression of women and how going against the societal standard creates an outcast k