Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which award-winning author Rivka Galchen’s writing is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a tale for our time—the story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear.

The year is 1619, 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, Katherina Kepler is accused of being a witch.

An illiterate widow, Katherina is 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 Katherina 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 Katherina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katherina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katherina 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, Katherina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.

Provocative and entertaining, Galchen’s bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society, and a family, undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

Really wanted to like this. It is fully in my wheelhouse. Love historical fiction, love a dabble in the occult. Reading it during spooky season. It drags. Lord it drags. The book has a great voice it just doesn't dispatch with the plot quick enough.

I would rate this higher, but it was difficult to discern which character was speaking—the transitions were abrupt, and there was no introduction or allusion to which character was now in charge of the story. This made for a sometimes confusing read/listen.

Very well done historical fiction; bonus star for having proper notes and sources at the end.

Katharina Kepler is illiterate, so it is her neighbor, friend, and legal guardian Simon who writes down her account of being accused of and tried for witchcraft. Simon doesn't like to stand out or attract attention to himself, but he feels a sense of obligation to Katharina, so he commits himself to standing by her in her troubles. He goes with her to the court, speaks up for her in his understated way, and writes down verbatim what she recounts as her experience.

Katharina's narrative includes her sharp evaluations of all the people involved, and sometimes whimsical preoccupations. Her principle accuser, the glazier's wife, she call the Werewolf. The Werewolf's brother she calls the Cabbage. The local governor, whose name is Einhorn, she calls the False Unicorn. She dotes on her cow, Chamomile, and offers medical advice to anyone who seems to be ailing. In many ways she is an easy target for people who resent her, and she refuses to change her behavior in the face of the accusations against her. Her son, the astronomer Johannes Kepler, is also a strike against her, since he published theologically suspect writings and is at odds with the Lutheran and Catholic churches.

The book alternates between Katharina's narrative (as written by Simon), personal notes inserted by Simon about his own state of mind, and testimony from witnesses that appears in questionnaire form. It's funny, maddening, and sad, and also the most enjoyable book I've read this summer.