Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
manifests in bookstores everywhere
January 14, 2025!

Set in a home for unwed mothers in 1970, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, is about four teenaged girls who are sent away to have their babies in secret. Trapped in a maternity home in St. Augustine, Florida, they’re helpless, powerless, and in despair, until they discover the power of witchcraft.

Pre-order it now from Bookshop.org, Amazon,
or get a special edition from Barnes & Noble with extra material!

If you’re in the UK you can pre-order your copy here!
Or you can order the limited Waterstones edition with bloody edges!

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I’ve wanted to write this book for years but it was a rough one for a whole bunch of reasons.

Many years ago, I learned that two of my relatives had been sent away (as it was called) when they were teenagers. No one knew, not even their siblings, until much, much later in their lives. I loved both of these women very much and the idea that they had been sent away when they were teenagers to have children in secret and never talk about it again horrified me. I could not — cannot — imagine how scared, lonely, and desperate they must have felt.

We don’t remember the homes for unwed mothers much these days, but there were close to 200 of them across North America for decades and millions of girls were hidden in them to have their children. If you want to learn more about them, I cannot recommend Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away highly enough. It’s a heartbreaking history of the homes often told in the voices of the women who were sent to them and it will wreck you.*

Making things even more complicated is that this is a book about witches and witches are tricky. Is a witch an old crone living in a house made of candy who eats children? Is she dancing naked in the moonlight and celebrating her power? Is she kissing the Devil’s backside at a black mass? Is she an innocent woman, falsely accused and executed in Salem? A witch changes size and shape depending on circumstances and the more you try to pin her down the faster she slips away. She kept slipping away from me.**

Over the course of 14 months, I turned in 8 different drafts of this book and the first 3 drafts didn’t even include witchcraft at all (don’t ask). I was changing this manuscript right up until the final hour, trying desperately to get it right, and it wouldn’t come together until finally at the last minute the witches, who I’d been trying so hard to get on the page, slipped away and surprised me. By their very definition, witches cannot be defined, and that’s how they made this book work.

Ultimately, I may not have gotten this one right, but I hope I got more things right than wrong. Because not only is this book inspired by something that happened in my family, not only is it about the slippery subject of witches, but it’s also about something else important to me.

For years, readers have asked me to write a book about librarians. As someone who was practically raised in libraries I’ve always wanted to write about them, too, but never found the right book. This is that book. Because every librarian protects secret knowledge. Every librarian tries to pass information on down the decades to the people who need it the most. Every librarian knows that reading is, literally, magic. Because every librarian is also a witch.

You can also pre-order the Witchcraft ebook from Google Play or pre-order the audiobook from Apple.

*NOTE: A childless, middle-aged man is probably the last person who should be writing a book in which every character is pregnant, but I could not let this story go and so I worked with a legion of OBs, nurses, and lawyers to get the details right, and I had an army of mothers who shared their birth stories and gave me advice. Anything that’s wrong in this book is my fault, not theirs.

** NOTE: There are plenty of self-identified witches out there today, and so I wanted to invent my own witch tradition rather than appropriating one. I incorporated aspects of Gardnerian and Dianic Wicca, some classical Greek and Roman witchery, bits of hoodoo and Appalachian folk magic, and I invented a whole lot of it out of thin air.