Witchcraft for Wayward Girls -- Grady Hendrix, Hardcover

There's power in a book...

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they're 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. There's Rose, a hippie who insists she's going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby's 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 they're allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what's 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 it's never given freely. There's always a price to be paid...and it's usually paid in blood.

In Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, the author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group delivers another searing, completely original novel and further cements his status as a "horror master" (NPR).

Author: Grady Hendrix
Publisher: Berkley Books
Published: 01/14/2025
Pages: 496
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.47lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.09d
ISBN: 9780593548981

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 03/01/2024 pg. 1
Publishers Weekly 10/07/2024
Booklist 10/15/2024 pg. 32

About the Author
Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend's Exorcism (which was adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios), We Sold Our Souls, and the New York Times bestseller The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires (currently being adapted into a TV series). Grady also authored the Bram Stoker Award-winning 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.