The Witching Tide

• Author: Margaret Meyer
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Publication Date: September 5, 2023
• Publisher: Scribner

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: violence, blood, death of a child, grief, mention of abuse, mention of molestation, parental abandonment, torture, mention of death of a parent, ableism

For readers of Margaret Atwood and Hilary Mantel, an immersive literary debut inspired by historical events—a deadly witch hunt in 17th-century England—that claimed many innocent lives.

East Anglia, 1645. Martha Hallybread, a midwife, healer, and servant, has lived peacefully for more than four decades in her beloved coastal village of Cleftwater. Rendered voiceless as a child, Martha has not spoken a word in years.

One autumn morning, a sinister newcomer appears. The witchfinder, Silas Makepeace, has been blazing a trail of destruction along the coast, and now has Cleftwater in his sights. His arrival strikes fear into the heart of the community. Within a day, local women are being captured and detained, and Martha finds herself a silent witness to the hunt.

Powerless to protest, Martha is enlisted to search the accused women for “devil’s marks.” Now she is caught between suspicion and betrayal, having to choose between protecting herself or condemning the women of the village. In desperation, she revives a wax witching doll that belonged to her mother, in the hope that it will bring protection. But the doll’s true powers are unknowable, Martha harbors a terrible secret that could cost her own freedom, and the gallows are looming…

Set over the course of just a few weeks that forever change the people of this village, The Witching Tide offers powerful and psychologically astute insights about the exigencies of friendship and the nature of loyalty, and heralds the arrival of a striking new voice in fiction.

Have you ever read a book and been blown away by how incredibly it was written, and then realized afterwards that it is a debut and been even more impressed? That is exactly what happened to me with this book. Autumn is the perfect time to start reading darker themed books, and especially those pertaining to witches, so this was the right time for this one.

This is a slower-paced, character-driven story, very unlike my usual favorites, but there was something about this book that just pulled me in and wouldn’t let go. Martha has been unable to speak since she was a child, and she thinks of it as a worm that blocks her words from coming out. Instead, she has worked out a rudimentary type of sign language that allows her to communicate with the people she interacts with, but she struggles to express herself adequately when it comes to deeper concepts.

It’s easy to empathize with Martha, especially since we get a front seat view to her innermost thoughts. She finds joy in caring for Kit, her employer, who she has raised since she was a baby, and kind of views as her own family. Working as a midwife and healer, she interacts with basically everyone in the village. There’s a sense of foreshadowing throughout the story, probably because I already know how witch trials went. But Martha and her friend deliver a baby with a cleft palate, which was a fatal deformity at that time, and she humanely kills the baby to stop it from suffering. But shortly after this, the witch finder arrives looking for trouble, and won’t stop looking until he finds it. 

Initially, Martha is pressed into service as an inspector, forced to search the accused women for identifying “witch’s marks.” However, when the friend who helped her deliver the baby that died is charged with witchcraft and Martha isn’t, she struggles with an inner turmoil over her own role in the incident and why she wasn’t implicated. Despite her desire to confess her own guilt, she is unable to express herself adequately and is forced to help condemn people she knows are innocent. 

Ultimately, I loved watching Martha’s story unfold and seeing how she resolves her conflict. The way that she interacts with others was incredibly intriguing, especially since she herself has a disability, yet it isn’t viewed negatively while others are viewed as the devil’s work. Seeing how she adapted to her disability, as well as the people in her village adapted to her needs, was wonderful, since it basically equated to an entire village learning basic sign language concepts to be able to understand what she is saying to them, while they can communicate to her verbally. And I found it especially timely to see how quickly and easily hysteria spreads—whether it’s witches or COVID or politics or anything else. But either way, this is a book that is meticulously researched, wonderfully written, and the kind I couldn’t stop thinking about, even after I finished reading it.