YA Adventures In The Occult (Oh, My!)

YA Adventures In The Occult (Oh, My!)

Are curses real? Is there such thing as witchcraft? Can
actions and words harm people decades or centuries into the future?
Two chilling YA novels set on different continents explore these
tantalizing questions.

A Lesson In Vengeance
"Godwin House was built in the early eighteenth century, the
first construction of Dalloway School. Within ten years of its
founding, it saw five violent deaths. Sometimes I still smell blood
on the air, as if Godwin's macabre history is buried in its uneven
foundations alongside Margery Lemont's bones."
Felecity Morrow, protagonist of Victoria Lee's A Lesson In
Vengeance, is returning to Dalloway School for a second attempt at her
senior year. She'd had to be hospitalized following the sudden,
tragic death of her girlfriend, a death she feels at least partially
responsible for. She's coming back to a place where not only are
there so many unresolved memories, but a number of her fellow students
are convinced of her guilt.
But her memories of Alex and how their relationship went
horrible wrong at the end aren't all that haunts Felicity. Her dorm,
Godwin House, was the scene of five macabre murders when the school
opened.
"The Dalloway Five.
Flora Grayfriar, who was murdered first by the girls she thought
were friends.
Tamsyn Penhaligon, hanged from a tree.
Beatrix Walker, her body broken on a stone floor.
Cordelia Darling, drowned.
And...Margery Lemont, buried alive."
In life the girls were suspected of being witches. Over the
centuries Dalloway girls have kept their memory alive through covert
rituals. Felicity believes Alex died because they had trapped Margery
in their time through a botched ritual. Perhaps she will be next.
A new Godwin House resident, Ellis Haley, is an already
published teen author. She's working on a novel about the Dalloway
Five. She calls herself a method writer which means she must
personally experience what she writes about...
...which is so not a good idea when macabre homicides are
involved.
If your literary taste runs to noir and psychic suspense you
will not want to miss out A Lesson In Vengeance.

All The Bad Apples
"...I'm giving you one last chance. If I get even a whiff of
this off you again, I'm sending you to one of those camps. Sort this
nonsense out once and for all. I won't have another bad apple in this
family..."
We've traveled overseas and back in time to Ireland nearly a
decade ago. Deena, protagonist of Moira Fowley-Doyle's All The Bad
Apples, has just turned seventeen. Her father, who abandoned his
children after the death of his wife, leaving her to be raised by her
seventeen-year-old sister and only visiting now and then, to prevent
them from disgracing the family name, has entered the house in time to
hear her tell Rachel that she's gay. He acts predictably.
Mandy, Rachel's bad apple twin, acts a lot less predictably to
the revelation. She's horrified when she learns about that encounter--
and not by their father's homophobia. It's the Rys family curse.
"It happens at the age of seventeen. Like some kind of fairy
tale. If you've lived a life on the straight and narrow, the curse
may never find you. But, if you're considered rotten by the rest of
the family, you're doomed."
Three banshees are involved. The first will scream. The second
will shed grey hairs on the threshhold of her home, the third will
scratch her in her sleep.
Mandy tells Deena to not let anyone else in the family know.
Meanwhile she will find a way to break the generations old curse.
Only Mandy disappears. Her car is discovered at the top of a
seaside cliff. A woman reports a suicide. Although no body is
discovered the family holds a funeral.
Then Deena discovers the first of a series of letters from the
deceased, each leading her to the next. She's sure at the end of her
quest she'll find a very much alive Mandy. Following the clues, aided
by an unlikely trio, she discovers the dark secrets of not only a
family, but a nation.
Fowley-Doyle says that her book was "in part, fueled by rage."
*Rage about the Catholic mother and baby homes to which pregnant girls
were sent to hide their disgrace. Some babies were adopted by rich
families but others were housed under negligent and abusive conditions
or died young, to be buried in mass graves, one of which contained 796
little corpses.
*Rage about the Catholic run laundries that exploited the girls after
they'd given birth and others who were considered bad apples.
And *Rage about Ireland's criminalization of abortion until well into
the 21st century. She sets the novel in 2012, the year a woman
needlessly died because she was denied the abortion that would have
saved her life.

Both reads are must reads not only for those curious about
witchcraft and curses, but for YA and adult femenists. They speak
volumes about the stigmatization of females.
On a personal note, if I lived in Ireland I would probably be dead.
Abortion was legalized there in 2018. In 1995 I was carrying a dead
(as verified by lack of heartbeat) fetus. Miscarriage failed to
terminate the pregnancy. When I had been bleeding more than forty
days and had chills and fever I had the abortion that saved me from
death or sterility. My beloved Adam was born healthy and strong in
1997.
A great big shout out goes out to those who work to expose the sins
(on the part of institutions, not the individuals they victimized) of
past and present and rectify things.
Jules Hathaway





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