The Wild Hunt has published my book review of The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken.
If you’re not familiar with it, The Wild Hunt is one of the longest-running online publications in the Pagan world. They cover news, culture, and commentary, and they also publish reviews and essays that take our books seriously (including the strange ones, the difficult ones, and the ones that don’t fit neatly into any one genre).
What first drew me to The Wax Child was its narrator: a being made of beeswax, rose hip, hair, fingernails, dread, and longing. How delightfully weird is that? I had to know more about a book narrated by a wax child—especially one based on the real folk magic practice of “voksbarn,” wax dolls used in spell-casting throughout Scandinavian history.
The novel tells the story of the 1621 Aalborg witch trials in Northern Jutland, where four Danish women, including the wax child’s creator Christenze Kruckow, face witchcraft accusations during Denmark’s most brutal period of persecution. Ravn draws from genuine historical sources—court records, letters, ledgers, and grimoires—to create something that defies easy categorisation.
The novel asks questions that many contemporary Pagans and Witches grapple with: how do we relate to the history of witch trials? What’s the relationship between folk magic practices and the accusations that led to executions? The book also challenges conventional ideas about what historical fiction should look like.
In my review for The Wild Hunt, I discuss why this strange narrator works so well, how the novel handles the gap between folk magic practice and witchcraft accusations, and what makes this approach to historical trauma different from other contemporary retellings of witch trials.
You can read my complete review at The Wild Hunt. I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially if you’ve read the book or have strong feelings about how contemporary literature handles witch trials and persecution.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn is available now in hardback, paperback, on Kindle, and on Audible.