Some things are so small but they make all the difference: a ring on your finger, three little letters in front of your name, a couple of birthdays. Tiny things, but they changed our entire lives.

Holy shit, I wish they added this book in the high school sex-ed classes! I must say this book is about 10% witchcraft, 40% adults being shitty to teenagers and 50% about the experience of giving birth and the trauma surrounding this event multiplied tenfold by the young mothers being forced to give up their children to “proper” families to raise them.

Set in the 1960’s when hippies where a word to be whispered and feared (don’t go to the forest at night, there are hippies there!), when free love was everywhere but home. The “sex” word and what it entailed was never fully explained, and if a girl did get a bit in trouble, then what could the family do but to put her in a special place (expensive!) where she could be out of the view of curious neighbours and family and she would give birth and then return baby-less to her family.

It would have been as it would have never happened!

Florida was Hell. Back in Alabama they had hills and trees and lakes, but Florida was an endless flat tabletop with no escape from the sun. It beat down on the highway, cooked the roof of the station wagon, sent sweat slicking down her bulging stomach, trickling into her rubber girdles, pooling underneath her butt.

We follow sweaty Nerm as she sits in her father’s car on the way to such a place, due to give birth in August. Her love affair with “Guy” turned bad when she got pregnant.

She knew he’d be scared at first but she also knew that when he got over his surprise he’d squeeze her hand and say What are we going to do, Nev? or maybe Do you think we’re too young to get married? or maybe put his arm around her and tell her they’d get through it together. Instead, he pulled away from her and stared into the fountain.
Finally, Guy turned to her and his eyes were full of tears and he said, “How could you do this to me?”
Then he got up and left.

Unfortunately, this was very common. Once the deed is done, the outcome is never the guy’s fault. It’s the girls for not having prepared better. I don’t even think they knew about “safe days” and “precautionary measures”. And abortion is not an option. Her father sent her to her aunt’s but then she got kicked out of there as well when she stole a book about pregnancy and giving birth. She got taken to this place far, far away where she would carry her “shameful” act to fruition.

She couldn’t believe they were for real. Their bellies stuck out, they displayed their disgrace, they flaunted their sin. Fern had been walking around in two rubber girdles, hunched over inside her poncho, for so many months she didn’t think she’d ever stand up straight again, and here they were, strutting up and down the hall, no girdles in sight, rubbing the evidence of what they’d done in everyone’s faces, and Fern realized that this was what had made her dad leave without saying goodbye. He’d seen these girls and realized she was one of them now. She wasn’t the baby he’d bathed and dressed, the little girl he’d taught to ride a bike, the daughter who’d sat beside him in the garage reading sci-fi paperbacks in the summer. She was an unwed mother now and he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of it.

This broke me a little. How can a parent do this to their kid? Nothing changes while at the same time everything does.

We get presented to the home.

Fern surrendered to the Home. It was a machine that took in wayward girls and put out adoptable babies, and it operated according to one principle: a strict schedule disciplined lazy minds.

The concept is good. Keep the girls schooled and busy till the end of their final trimester. Offer medical care, rest and fun. The only thing that was dubious about it was how much money it charged parents and apparently also infertile couples – promising them a child from a disgraced teen mother who wouldn’t want anything to do with it anymore. Or wouldn’t afford to raise it on her own. The girls receive new names – all flowers. Rose, and Peony, and Fern and Myrtle. They are a group of forlorn and forgotten children going through one of the most traumatizing experiences of their lives without any parental support and without knowing how it would be. Will it hurt? Will they give you something for the pain? They don’t know and none of the girls who had given birth return to their fold to share the story.

It’s only free-spirited Rose who wants to keep her baby. She named her Blossom. She sees a life where they both get out of here and be free together.

They’d been told over and over that all they could do was ruin their babies’ lives. But on that long, hot, empty afternoon, they tasted what it would be like to see their babies, to hold them, to smell them, and it felt so real, and so true, that for a moment they felt like what they were, they felt like mothers, and it stunned them into silence.

The only entertainment they have is a book van which comes every two weeks and brings books for the young minds to read. Some Moby Dick, some Jungle adventures. Nothing too raunchy or liberal. It’s only when Fern asks the Librarian for any books on childbirth or one that can help them get out of there, she is given a pamphlet book (self-printed) on a Groovy Guide to Witchcraft.

Fern kept reading, weighing each new spell as it materialized on the page, evaluating how likely it was to save Holly. Invisibility? Spiritual protection? The power of flight? There were spells for Finding That Which Is Hidden, spells for Understanding the Hearts of Men, spells for Necromancy, spells for banishing and binding and raising a storm, spells to Leave the Body, and spells To See Who Will Die.
But there wasn’t anything that told her how to get a fourteenyear-old girl and her baby to another city and set her up in a pad with a job and a new identity, especially if she didn’t have any money.

Until they were eighteen, adults moved them around like checkers, stuck them wherever they wanted, made them do whatever they wanted, made them give away their babies if they wanted. No one cared what they wanted. And that’s just how it was.

The story unfolds around the 4 girls who swear allegiance to a witch (the Librarian) after they swam naked in the river and they become a pregnant coven. They try a few spells, one to alleviate morning sickness and one to perform revenge on the headmistress after Rose’s baby is forcefully taken away. There are only three of them left now – Fern, little Holly and Zinia and Fern has just given birth and her baby was taken from her arms.

Her business was to get As, and be in the senior play, and be helpful and friendly, then go to college, date a good guy, get married, have children, and forget.
But she didn’t think she’d be able to forget Charlie Brown. She didn’t think she’d be able to forget that soft heaviness in her arms. She didn’t think she’d be able to forget her smell. No one would want to talk about her daughter, no one would want to remember her, so she’d become a secret that Fern would turn over and over in her mind for the rest of her life, like a knife with no handle, a knife that was all blade, a knife that would make her bleed every time she took it out.
She would bleed whenever she saw a pregnant woman in a store. She would bleed whenever a friend asked if she wanted to hold their baby. She would bleed when she didn’t turn the newspaper fast enough past the birth announcements. Guy wouldn’t bleed. Reverend Jerry wouldn’t bleed. Carlton Sinclair the Third wouldn’t bleed.
But she and Rose, and Holly, and Zinnia, and Clem, and Hazel, and Myrtle, and Jasmine, and Briony, and Flora, and Daisy, and Ginger, and Laurel, and Willow, and Violet, and Iris, and Tansy, they would all bleed and bleed and bleed.
“Was it worth it?” Coach asked over his shoulder.
“You almost killed your friend and her baby and for what?”
“That’s the problem with these kids,” Latin Teacher said. “They never consider the consequences.”

The book climaxes with a massive storm raised by the witches – all done in order to protect their youngest, Holly, from being returned to the arms of her very loving, very pedophile preacher, who now was willing to adopt her sin baby (it was his!). The preacher got hit by some falling branches and he would have been drowned in a puddle just by moving his head a bit more to the right. Holly escapes with her baby to the group of hippie witches in the forest and Fern and Zinnia go back to their families without their bubbas. But their bubbas will find them in the future and some might be angry and some might be glad to be reunited with their birth mothers.

All in all, book was a fantastic read and even though it had a supernatural aspect, the human drama behind it was real and it did happen and it’s a starch reminder that sometimes humans are the monsters in life. And sometimes parents don’t know what’s best for their kids.

This is the world we live in, Diane said. It’s not perfect, but it’s the only world we’ve got.
But in this world, they made me look at my baby—they made me look at my daughter—and say I didn’t want her. I don’t care if it was for the best, or if I did the right thing. I don’t care about the reasons. I never should have had to do that. No one should ever have to do that thing.
But maybe there’s another world. A better world. Maybe in that world there is a witch.