When Witches Can’t Cast is a novel by Matilda Lockwood.
Finished on: 16.7.2025
[I won this book in a LibraryThing Early Reviewer give-away.]

Content Note: sexual harassment, (critical treatment of) misogyny

Plot:
After being accused of witchcraft, Gatty Carter barely made it out of her village alive. That the villagers actually believe that she died, seems like a big advantage under the circumstances, but a woman on the run in 1758 doesn’t actually have many options. When she tries to work her way to a meal, Gatty lends in a different spot of trouble. But she finds refuge in Blythewood Hall, among other women equally accused. Now, Gatty has the chance to rebuild her life. But the past has a way of catching up to her.

When Witches Can’t Cast was obviously written with a lot of good intentions, but unfortunately, the execution of said intentions left some room for improvement. I found myself growing annoyed with the novel pretty quickly.

When Witches Can’t Cast opens with a small warning that there is no actual magic happening in it. And this was good and important because the plot description did make me think that there would be something magical happening, and I can’t even tell you why – the title is literally “can’t cast” and the description mentions that the women at Blythewood don’t have any magical powers. With my expectations suitably adjusted, I started the novel itself and it starts just fine. The description of Gatty’s flight from her village was tense and gripping, despite using the most convenient corpse in the history of coincidence.

But then things went downhill pretty fast. Gatty ends up in another village a day later and is arrested almost immediately (nobody knows her there, it’s just some bad luck and being a woman on her own). Only a few hours later, she is rescued from the stocks by some representatives of Blythewood Hall, who not only know oft he witchcraft accusations, but also now Gatty’s full name although she never gave it in that other village.

And that’s not the only part where the timing of things didn’t make sense to me. I’m no botanist, but plants play a big part in Blythewood, and when those plants bloom or get dried and whatever they do with them seemed completely weird to me. (Drying lavender in something like November? Really? When it blooms in June, July, maybe August?) Speaking of the plants, Gatty’s fear of the so-called “poison garden” in Blythewood when she has been working with plants and as a healer all her life seemed completely unbelievable to me. As did the fact that Gatty knows how to read (the book’s explanation: she learned from her mother on the sly. BUT WHERE DID HER MOTHER LEARN IT???). Maybe that is a Tiffany kind of problem, but it bugged me.

Plus, characters came out of nowhere and disappeared again. Other characters returned time and again after I thought that the story was well and truly done with them. And the book has a strong tendency to rely on coincidences (even apart from the aforementioned corpse). Gatty leaves Blythewood Hall twice, and twice she is seen by somebody from her original village, despite said village being so far away that Gatty had never heard of Blythewood.

Then there are multiple instances where Gatty refutes accusations of witchcraft at Blythewood by pretending that they are actually really scary witches, which makes no sense whatsoever. And there were just a couple of small things where an editor could have really made a difference (for example when Gatty prepares a potion for Helena, the mistress of Blythewood and it becomes a bit of a test The thing is, we never hear of the order given or the request made – we learn of the request in passing, and it is obvious that the book thought the reader knew already). Lockwood thanks her beta readers in the acknowledgements, but a beta reader is not a professional editor and should not be mistaken for such.

Add to all of this that Gatty really starts to suffer from a Mary-Sue-ish ability to be able to do anything and everything and becoming the leader and the mastermind and the teacher and also the prettiest and the one who finally makes Blythewood what it could have been all along and the person who literally argues her way out of witchcraft accusations (seriously, only villagers fall for witchcraft rumors, a magistrate listens to reason and evidence. Yeah. Right). And I am well aware of the misogyny inherent in the derogatory use of Mary Sue, but in this case, it is a good short hand for this kind of protagonist who never gets or does anything wrong ever.

There were several times where I almost DNFed this book, and maybe I should have. But I always feel a special kind of obligation to LibraryThing Early Reviewer books, especially when they cover feminist topics, so I stuck with it. But I couldn’t really enjoy it anymore, even if I found the (disappointingly straight) romance pretty cute.

Summarizing: sometimes I wish my inner editor would be less critical, but this book would have needed it.