Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

(Paperback, Large Print Edition)

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Description

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And theyre sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. Theres Rose, a hippie who insists shes going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her babys father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything theyre allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know whats best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and its never given freely. Theres always a price to be paid...and its usually paid in blood.

Reviews

Another stellar novel from Hendrix, a perfectly constructed story that has a strong emotional core, compelling plot, unforgettable characters, and 360 degrees of terror. Booklist (starred review)

Author Bio

Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstor, My Best Friends Exorcism (which was adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios), We Sold Our Souls, and the New York Times bestseller The Southern Book Clubs Guide to Slaying Vampires (currently being adapted into a TV series). Grady also authored the Bram Stoker Awardwinning nonfiction book Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties, and his latest non-fiction book is These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World.