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

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i don't know why the author felt the need to mention fecal matters so many times but it felt extremely out of place.

Some of the writing is beautiful, some is what I guess is 'stream of consciousness'; interesting, but too long and it gets a bit tiresome.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Whether Logan is describing a dismembered bear whose lopped-off parts are handed out as favours at a banquet, or a gory flagellant’s parade, the images we are offered snap and sizzle with portent and possibility. Wordsmith extraordinaire Kirsty Logan has written what is possibly her best novel yet in a tale that feels as old as the hills but sparkles with formal inventiveness.

Logan’s examination of issues of gender and power may not be desperately original but it’s thoughtful and heartfelt.The littlest prick and all those stories will simply explode out, shrieking like fat in a fire, and anyone nearby can hear it all. But, on the off chance you have no clue what I’m rattling on about, all I can say is, read this book to find out. At one crucial moment, in an observation that might serve as an apt comment on the novel as a whole, the lady Lux has been serving says of stories: “Each person is stuffed full to bursting with them, fat as pigs ready for a feast. Not even to mention the beautiful circularity of the story, and the way that shards from the first page fall into place and are mirrored once we reach the ending. The few cases in which midwives were accused of witchcraft, their jobs as midwives were often coincidental.

I think the big topics were given due respect and breathing room for the most part, although of course that feels like a very personal rubric. Any who assume agency are swiftly denounced and brutally dealt with: those labelled witches are tied to poles in the sea and left to slowly drown; others guilty of lesser offences (talking too much, too loudly or indeed at all) are paraded around in scold’s bridles, torture devices deployed to humiliate. I HATE the myth of the female herbalist/midwife/abortionist who only tried to help the poor villagers and then gets murdered because men hate women with agency.This novel clearly falls in that neo-subgenre of “feminist-witch-fiction” has become so oversaturated in the past few years that I thought I was done with it.

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. This is a book where you sit down to review it and end up having to ask yourself, how do I even start to describe it? The synopsis of the story is fairly straightforward -- Luz, a young woman, thrown from a monastery she never chose to go to, is chased out of her hometown by odious townsfolk accusing her of witchcraft.But there’s something about Kirsty Logan’s writing that seems to transcend the story itself; that reaches into the heart of a deep, dark, hidden history and pulls out a truth that resonates down the ages. 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. That’s where this book touched my aching burning forehead and brought me cool relief with its icy long fingers; the only thing I ever have to be; is myself.