Olivia Costa
Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch.
Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2021. $29.99.
Everyone knows that witchcraft runs in Katharina Kepler’s family, and everyone’s pretty certain that her mother was a witch—when actually, it was her aunt. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch transports readers back to seventeenth-century Württemberg and places them in a world of plague, war, and the firestorm of suspicions that generated witch hunts.
Katharina is a seventy-one-year-old widow accused of witchcraft by a glazier’s wife, Ursula Reinbold, whom Katharina not-so-affectionately calls the Werewolf. Ursula’s accusation sparks panic, and the townspeople are quick to turn on Katharina with outrageous claims: she rode a goat backward to death, she gave a “witch’s grip” to a girl she didn’t even touch, she asked a gravedigger to dig up her father’s skull so that she might use it as a drinking goblet. Katharina’s response to these outlandish accusations is the same as mine: they’re all a bunch of rubbish.
Katharina is a familiar grandmotherly figure with her maternal, often blunt comments. Nothing that she endures can break her spirit—and she has endured a lot in her seventy years. While the novel is concerned with seventeenth century issues, there is an underlying commentary on injustices that women continue to face in the twenty-first century. Simon, Katharina’s neighbour, says, “There was the matter of whether you were born rich or poor, a man or a woman—those, too, powerfully affected one’s fate.” Katharina becomes a different woman at the end of the novel, a change observed by Simon himself. After years of being resilient, she is suddenly weary, perhaps from a lifetime of fighting a patriarchal system that was keen to burn women at the stake.
Simon, as a secondary narrator, shares some of the most interesting insights throughout the novel. His insistence on not seeing monsters in others draws a sharp contrast between himself and the townspeople and shows how groupthink enabled witch trials. While Simon constantly reminds Katharina not to see monsters in the people who have accused her, the townspeople are all too eager to make a monster out of her. In sometimes a complicated structure, Galchen alternates Katharina’s and Simon’s perspectives with letters and testimonies that she has imagined on behalf of the accusers. Through these varied points of view, readers see that the accusers are willing to say anything to make the jury believe what they want them to believe.
While the issues throughout the novel are grim, Galchen’s beautiful prose makes the novel a pleasure to read. Katharina is prone to odd metaphors and comments that provide relief in tense moments. When she wakes in her prison cell with a fever, she thinks, “I did begin to wonder if I had died. If I had joined the other women in my situation. But then I started to think of a cooked egg. A dead person would in no way think of a cooked egg.” Katharina also often has profound thoughts, such as, “Some people worry about being born under an unlucky star. I don’t. I worry about being born in an unlucky place.”
The research and care that Galchen put into this novel is apparent through how authentically she brings Katharina Kepler and her story to life. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a plea to readers to not forget Katharina or any of the accused who lost their lives because people were eager to make monsters out of women.
Olivia Costa
is a writer, editor, musician, and avid reader of all things fantasy. She is the Publishing & Web Intern for The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. She lives in Mississauga, where she studies in the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College.