{"id":7112,"date":"2026-08-24T04:47:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T04:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7112"},"modified":"2026-08-24T04:47:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T04:47:17","slug":"the-witch-by-freida-mcfadden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7112","title":{"rendered":"The Witch by Freida McFadden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hitty Atkins sells herbs at the Woodhaven market, rain or shine, from one of the emptier tables. She is old, nearly toothless, a widow whose only child drowned after other boys pushed him in. She grows the best produce in the settlement and gets the least custom for it, because the town has decided she is peculiar. On the morning we meet her she is wearing a woollen dress of a yellow so vivid that her one friend, the wealthiest young wife in Woodhaven, admires it and then privately reflects that she could never wear such a colour herself. People would ask how she had achieved it. The talk would turn unkind. That single paragraph about a frock, arriving on page thirty-nine, contains the whole logic of The Witch by Freida McFadden<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The Woman in the Yellow Dress<\/h2>\n

The novel runs two first-person narrators in alternation. In 1692, Caroline Eldridge is twenty years old, three years married to a merchant fifteen years her senior, childless and lying to him about it. In the present, her descendant Julia Barlow moves into the same house, broke and jobless, to help look after a grandmother whose memory is failing. The house is called Pemberton, it was built in 1660, and it does not behave.<\/p>\n

Almost everything valuable in The Witch by Freida McFadden<\/strong> happens in the older half. What is striking is how unmelodramatic the mechanism of ruin turns out to be. Nobody in Woodhaven wakes up wanting to kill an old woman. What they have is a strangler at large, a doctor who names a fee no farmer can pay and then generously accepts the family horse instead, a butcher who lost money years ago and privately blames the herb-seller\u2019s curse, and a magistrate who has decided that testimony about visions counts as evidence. Add a maidservant who resents her mistress, and there is more than enough machinery.<\/p>\n

Caroline is not a modern woman inserted into a bonnet. Her instincts are period-correct and often wrong. She keeps feeding a stray black cat because she cannot bear to let a creature starve, and it does not occur to her how that will be described later. She nurses a feverish neighbour back from the brink with cool rags because a friend once told her fever makes a body shake, and she is genuinely uncertain afterwards whether she caused the fit. The novel is at its best in that uncertainty. When the whole town insists a thing is true, the accused starts checking her own memory for corroboration.<\/p>\n

Freida McFadden Has Written Something Better Than Expected<\/h2>\n

The trial chapters are the reason to read this. They are procedurally exact and dramatised rather than explained: how spectral evidence let a neighbour testify that a wave of the hand caused her to feel needled all over; how a scald from a broth pot becomes a mark; how a character with an interest in the outcome gets to supply his own physical test. Once you are accused, no procedure exists by which you can be found innocent. That is the argument, and The Witch by Freida McFadden<\/strong> makes it without a single paragraph of authorial lecturing.<\/p>\n

Two scenes in particular are better than the book needs them to be. The first is a hanging, watched from the crowd by the one person present who knows the condemned woman is innocent, and what the woman on the platform says down to her friend is a sentence about the futility of speaking up that reframes everything after it. The second is a jail cell, where Caroline spends a week across the bars from a man she is certain is a monster, and the novel keeps quietly complicating the certainty without ever letting her off the hook for having held it.<\/p>\n

The Modern Half Is Scaffolding<\/h2>\n

The contemporary strand is competent and considerably thinner. Julia arrives, gets warned to lock her door, hears crying at three in the morning, sees a noose that is not there in daylight, and starts investigating. There is a museum curator in suspenders who wants to buy the estate and is more visibly aroused by the door knocker than by her. There is a certified ghost hunter whose credentials come from a website and whose electromagnetic meter is defeated in a fashion best not described here. And there is a phone app Julia downloads in desperation that offers up the words DRY and CARROT before serving her an advertisement. Whenever The Witch by Freida McFadden<\/strong> reaches for a laugh, it is almost always here.<\/p>\n

That is funny, and it is also the problem: the modern half keeps reaching for comedy to fill space the historical half fills with dread. Julia herself is largely a receiver. Things are revealed to her, shown to her, driven to her door. Her most decisive act in three hundred pages is borrowing a key.<\/p>\n

What redeems it is one strand played entirely straight. The grandmother\u2019s decline is written with real care \u2014 the practical daily reality of dementia<\/a>, rather than the gothic version \u2014 burnt toast picked up off the floor and presented with enormous pride, a knitting project silently unravelling, the wrong name used with total confidence, and a trip to a hair salon that produces more joy than anything else in the novel. McFadden dedicates the book to her two grandmothers, and it shows.<\/p>\n

Three Things The Witch by Freida McFadden Cannot Carry<\/h2>\n

The haunting is a long game played on the reader<\/strong>, and when the explanation arrives, several of the better set pieces lose their charge in retrospect. A few of them also require nimbleness from characters the book has repeatedly described as barely able to lift a bag.
\nThe romance is functional.<\/strong> One lovely scene involving a foxtrot danced on an empty street under a streetlight, and around it a relationship that exists mainly to give the plot a helpful man with laboratory contacts.
\nThe colonial voice slips.<\/strong> Verily and \u2019tis appear in sentences whose rhythm is unmistakably twenty-first century, and once noticed it is hard to stop noticing.<\/p>\n

None of that is fatal, because the construction underneath holds. There are two reveals, and the second one is genuinely well built: it depends on a physical object placed in front of the reader early and referred to throughout, and it is fair. Readers who admired the house-as-antagonist work in Mexican Gothic<\/a> by Silvia Moreno-Garcia will find a blunter, faster version of the same trick here, and anyone who liked the layered-centuries structure of The Book of Witching<\/a> by C. J. Cooke is squarely in the target audience. For the seventeenth century taken slowly and with full literary seriousness, Hour of the Witch<\/em> by Chris Bohjalian remains the better book, though it asks considerably more patience than The Witch by Freida McFadden<\/strong> does.<\/p>\n

Final Thoughts<\/h2>\n

A note at the front of the novel explains that the author keeps a content-warning list on her website, because readers respond to different things and because, as she puts it, her family members will be reading. It is a small, unfashionable courtesy, and it sets the tone: this is a thriller that intends to frighten without brutalising, and it manages that for four hundred pages.<\/p>\n

The Witch by Freida McFadden<\/strong> is the fourth book she has published this calendar year, which ought to be a warning and somehow is not. What it is instead is a good historical novel about the machinery of blame, running inside a serviceable haunted-house thriller, delivered at a pace that makes it very difficult to stop. The woman in the yellow dress deserved better from her town. The novel is at its best whenever it remembers that.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hitty Atkins sells herbs at the Woodhaven market, rain or shine, from one of the emptier tables. She is old, nearly toothless, a widow whose only child drowned after other boys pushed him in. She grows the best produce in the settlement and gets the least custom for it, because the town has decided she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7112"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}