by Deborah Rogers – 

The last read of our Book Club year turned out to be a bit of a let down. Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen had lots of elements that appealed to our group, but it missed the mark for most of our readers.

Galchen is a highly-lauded writer, frequently published in the New Yorker and London Review of Books, as well as a writing teacher at Columbia University. Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch is her second novel and earned prize nominations and critical acclaim. It’s a strange sort of book. Galchen took her inspiration from the true story of 17th-century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler’s fight to save his mother from being burned as a witch. In the early 1600s, Germany was in the grip of witch-hunting hysteria, with an estimated 900 women executed for witchcraft. Galchen’s book is a fictionalized account of this real scenario, with Katharina Kepler as the main character, accused of being a witch by a neighbour.

In the novel, Katharina’s plight is taken up by her neighbour Simon, who acts as guardian for her as she faces the magistrate and courts. The subject matter is a sort of absurd black humour. We see increasingly ridiculous charges levelled at the main character – who is an illiterate, old woman living alone with her cow – and she is unable to defend herself, because she is a woman. Katharina is charged with making her neighbour ill with a bitter potion, of walking past a man and causing a pain in his leg and of riding a goat backward. As each charge is added to the list, it gets harder and harder for Katharina to shrug them off.

The term “witch hunt” has been back in our vocabulary in recent years, and we couldn’t help but see the parallels to the current climate where individuals are frequently denounced for seemingly innocuous acts and then rounded on and hounded by increasing numbers. One of our readers noted the resonances between the 1600s and today, both times of plague and war. With all the in-depth research and clever connections between then and now, we were disappointed that the book just didn’t seem to go anywhere. The characters were underdeveloped, and we couldn’t get a sense of what was motivating them.

Although Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch was a struggle to get through for many of our group, we enjoyed our discussion. There’s no Book Club in December. We’ll be starting 2024 discussing Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. Join us on Tuesday, January 9 at 6:30 p.m. at the Sidney/North Saanich Library, but make sure you sign up to our email list to stay up-to-date with any Book Club news or meeting changes: www.seasidemagazine.ca/book-club/.