Hex by Jenni Fagan

This is an interesting read. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in witches, witch-hunt history, and feminism!

This is an intimate look at the Jacobean witch paranoia whipped up by James I. We zoom in on the human suffering of it all as we spend the last night before her execution in a condemned woman’s cell in Edinburgh. A visit from the future in the form of the shadowy Iris figure helps connect the fate of Geillis with women today. Iris and Geillis go over the circumstances that have led them here.

The North Berwick witch trials are scary, and the book uses real people and real context, making it even more terrifying. James I basically accused witches of whipping up a storm when he was bringing his future wife, Anne of Denmark over, which led to a moral panic and many executions. Many people lost their lives and tortured suspects implicated others, spreading the damage.

There’s a few moments where I wasn’t sure it all hung together perfectly in terms of dialogue/details, but overall I liked it a lot. It’s a short but intense read.

Jenni is a poet and you can see that in her poetic language, there’s a lot of beautiful descriptions of nature and animals.