Compounding Imanuelle’s tenuous place in mainstream Bethel is that she is biracial in a society where racist segregation is explicitly justified through religious dogma, and her Black father was burned at the stake for religious crimes. Immanuelle and her family live on the fringes of Bethelian polite society due to the transgressions of Imanuelle’s mother, who got pregnant out of wedlock and was accused of witchcraft and various other wrongdoings before dying in childbirth. Also, the religious aspects are even creepier. The main character of The Year of the Witching, Imanuelle Moore, is a teenager living in Bethel, an isolated society that feels very much like Hawthorne’s vision of Puritan New England but with more explicitly supernatural elements. This book delivers big time on all of the hair-raising quasi-Christian supernatural horror that I need in my life. In the vein of Hawthorne, it is jam-packed with creepy religious rites, rumoured devil-worship, witchcraft, and a pervasive sense of mounting dread.

This is not an inapt comparison however, I think in tone and setting it reads much more like Nathanial Hawthorne, but as written by a woman living in 2020. As it centers on a religious dystopia and has feminist themes, it has already been compared to the The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s unsettling and horrifying, beautiful and incisive, and ultimately, radiantly triumphant. The Year of the Witching is a very, very good book. There are no graphic excerpts in this review but I do mention the different kinds of violence where necessary to sufficiently discuss the book. However, readers should be warned that there are a couple of moderately graphic scenes of childbirth that end poorly as well as some moderately graphic scenes of parental/family abuse. In general, most of these incidents are not described in a graphic way in the text. Most of the abuse and violence takes place in the context of religious zealotry, which may be additionally triggering for some readers. It also includes allusions to incidents of very serious anti-Black violence.

This book includes a lot of sexist violence, including sexual abuse, domestic abuse, and murder.

The year of the witching book