Hi friends and happy Friday, I hope you’ve all had a good week! Today I’m posting my review of Rivka Galchen’s novel Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch.

This book was part of the 2022 Canada Reads longlist.

Everyone Knows You Mother is a Witch by: Rivka Galchen: It’s the year 1618 in Germany and Katherina Kepler is accused of being a witch. Known for her home remedies, when one of the townspeople, Ursula Reinbold claims she was poisoned from something she took from Katherina, the town start into a frenzy. A trial gets underway as they try to get to the bottom of it. Based on real events and documentations, that didn’t do much to make this novel any more enticing to read. This was an interesting novel; we jumped right into the story with basically no context and we’re left to put the pieces together. The reader really wanted to like this, but they found this tedious to read, unfortunately. The plot felt like it wasn’t going anywhere, there was no progression as if we were just going in circles. The reader did like the testimonies of the people of the town who were accusing the main character that she was a witch, those were fun and fascinating to read; we really got to learn of the town through them. Those were mixed in with parts from a narrator, which we are to assume is the main character, and the one being accused of being a witch; it’s never really specified and the reader just found those parts really clunky to read. If this book had just been testimonies, this would have been a better read for this reader because the narrator parts didn’t do anything for the story. There were multiple characters throughout the course of this short novel, but we didn’t really get to know them very well, most of them were just secondary, townsfolk. Even the main character, we got to know somewhat, as well as her family, but because the reader wasn’t very compelled by the story, they found getting to know her tiring and rather boring. The title is really cool and had that going for it, but story, plot and character wise, this just didn’t do it for the reader.