Title: Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch Author: Rivka Galchen
Published: June 8, 2021
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 275
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch.
Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business.
So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.
The historical fiction market is bursting at the seams—absolutely full to the brim—of novels about white women during World War II (seriously…look at the list of 2021 releases). It’s a myopic, over-saturated genre, and it seems to only be getting worse with time.
Which is why books like Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch are always such a treat to find. Sadly, this recent release isn’t marketed in a way that accurately advertises its contents. That’s not Rivka Galchen’s fault, but it is unfortunate. Absolutely nothing about the cover or the title indicate that this is a historical novel about Johannes Kepler’s mother, who was accused, imprisoned, and tried as a witch in 1620. (Surprise!)
This isn’t a long book, and it doesn’t waste a lot of time in grounding its narrative in the historical context. I think this makes it accessible to readers who don’t tend to go in for the chunky historical epics which at times can be more effort than they’re worth. (Looking at you, Margaret George.) In Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, Galchen isn’t focused so much on accurate details as she is on her craft and the distinctive tone of her narrator, the seventy-something alleged witch, Katharina. It’s a more literary approach to history than is typical, but not necessarily “literary” in the snooty, highbrow manner of, ahem…certain books.
Katharina’s experiences are given to readers through multiple framing devices. On one part, the book reads as a confession, orally dictated by the illiterate protagonist to her neighbor and friend, Simon. This part of the book is conversational, irreverent, and meandering, and the reader comes to know who Katharina is through her cheeky, shrewd observations of her situation and her fellow man. Then interspersed with the main narrative is the transcript of witness testimony at Katharina’s trial. Person by person, Galchen explores the minds of various people who are subpoenaed by the tribunal in order to speak against our narrator—or on her behalf, as the case may be. Although I cannot say that the two parts of the book quite came together to form one cohesive whole, I can’t say that the structure absolutely didn’t work.
Overall, I feel that Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is close to being a truly excellent book. It’s nearly there, and I’m frustrated because there’s nothing quite like enjoying a book but feeling the whole time that it could have been more. Here, the subject matter, the narration, and the suspenseful courtroom drama are full of promise, and they’re certainly a far cry from your overdone “WWII lady spy” story.
But to be perfectly honest, Galchen failed to bring everything together at the critical moment. She very deliberately threw down the curtain at the natural climax of the story, and although I feel this was intended to subvert readers’ expectations and make a specific point, all it did was leave me scratching my head. See, right when Katharina’s case is submitted to the courts and everyone is awaiting the verdict, everything stops. Simon, the neighbor who’s been writing down everything she says, takes over. Simon rambles a lot about various things, completely elides the main thrust of the plot, and then circles back with “oh yeah, Katharina was found innocent, she died a year later, and now everyone else is dead too. Toodles!”
Basically, Galchen threw the brakes in the middle of a riveting courtroom drama in order to shrug her shoulders. The momentum of the plot peters out, and as the reader, you wonder what was the purpose of it all anyway? And that is probably the intent! It’s a very litfic-y Ecclesiastical “everything is meaningless” denouement. But it doesn’t work, because as a character, Simon’s voice isn’t eloquent or distinctive enough to bring it all together. He’s boring, and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. So instead of being either satisfied by a riveting story or surprised by a though-provoking conclusion, the book kind of just…fades out.
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is disappointing not necessarily because it’s a bad book. Instead, I was underwhelmed because I could tell that (a) the author is very smart and had a point to make and (b) said point was never clearly arrived at. There’s no catharsis in this narrative, no sense of completion. At the most important moment, Galchen fumbled the pass.
All that being said, I enjoyed this book and do recommend it. Katharina Kepler, as envisioned here, is shrewd and has a keen eye for the ridiculous aspects of even the most frightening situation; she is equal parts exasperated by and grateful to her adult children; she loves her milk cow more than anything in the whole world. I’m happy to have met her, to have heard her story. I just wish that Galchen hadn’t snatched the microphone out of Katharina’s hands right as she was finishing up—instead she let a mediocre white man have the last word.
And really, isn’t that just typical?
