It is not surprising that Alice Hoffman, author of Practical Magic (1995) and its sequels, would tackle another book about witches. It’s also not surprising that Hoffman, whose warm and inviting prose has seduced readers since 1977, would find new variations on her perennial theme: witchcraft as a larger exploration of female power and freedom.
And yet so much about The Witches of Cambridge is surprising. Ambitious, lyrical and vast in scope, this book proves Hoffman still has fresh spells to cast, and more to say about women who dare to seize their innate gifts and build their lives as they wish.
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1950s, two young women arrive to attend Harvard-adjacent Radcliffe College. Ava is a farm girl from Maine, hampered by cold and overprotective parents and determined to see a world that’s been hidden from her, while bright and determined Lauren is from a proud old-money Massachusetts family. Despite their different backgrounds, the two girls bond immediately through their shared membership in the Lilith Society. Dating back to the age when women were still persecuted and executed for witchcraft in colonial New England, the society is a haven for young women with special gifts and an affinity for magic, and has cultivated powerful bloodlines across centuries. As Ava and Lauren settle into their new lives, they become unlikely best friends, bound by magic, love and a history that both of them are only beginning to discover.
Inspired by Hoffman’s own recent return to Cambridge to study for a postgraduate degree, The Witches of Cambridge spans all four years of Ava and Lauren’s college experience and is rich in the details of college life—the potential of it, the doubts, the alliances that form and break over years spent in the same environment. The book reads in part like a pocket history of Massachusetts witchcraft and a meditation on what was lost in the witch trials, what was saved and what could still be regained. Fact and fiction intertwine, particularly as characters bearing a family name made famous by the Salem Witch Trials of the 17th century rear their heads.
This luxurious reading experience hinges on the two young women at its heart, and, true to her reputation as a creator of finely drawn characters, Hoffman makes Ava and Lauren into two very distinct yet symbiotic souls. They care for each other, need each other and yet their backgrounds and outlooks seem primed to make them enemies. They dance around each other, sometimes drawing close and sometimes pushing away, yet always seem fated to orbit each other’s lives. There’s something undeniably magical about reading a book like this from one of our finest mainstream fiction voices at this phase of her career. The Witches of Cambridge proves that Hoffman has lost none of her gifts, and makes a wonderful companion to her past triumphs as well as a sharp introduction to one of America’s great popular novelists.