Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel
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Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which award-winning author Rivka Galchen's writing is known, Everyone Knows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.
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Rivka Galchen. (2021). Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Rivka Galchen. 2021. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
MLA Citation (style guide)Rivka Galchen. Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
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- bioText: Rivka Galchen received her MD from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, having spent a year in South America working on public health issues. Galchen completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham Fellow. Her essay on the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics was published in The Believer, and she is the recipient of a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Galchen lives in New York City. She is the author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances.
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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.- reviews
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April 15, 2021
Based loosely on the 1615 witch trial of Katharina (""Kath"") Kepler, Galchen's eagerly awaited second novel, following Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), pieces together the accusations and recriminations leveled at Kath through court documents, correspondence, and witness testimony. Whipped into suspicions by Ursula ""The Werewolf"" Reinbold, the denizens of Leonberg and Eltingen level allegations of sorcery and witchcraft against Kath. Her son, the famous astronomer, Johannes ""Hans"" Kepler, away at his post in Prague as an Imperial Mathematician, must intervene. Though the story unfolds in seventeenth-century Germany, Galchen gives Kath and the rest of her characters modern speech habits in a way that retains authenticity and makes for compulsively readable prose. Each short section expands the Reformation-era world of the novel, drawing readers into the small-town drama. Likewise, enchanted creatures and enticing oddities populate the book's pages: revenants and dryads are feared to haunt the forest, while Kath dispenses poultices of wolfsbane and remedies of cowslip. The highly satisfying result is part portrait of an eccentric woman, part social drama, and part nuanced recasting of historical misogynies.COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from April 19, 2021
Galchen’s captivating latest (after the children’s adventure Rat Rule 79) follows an illiterate widow as she confronts accusations of being a witch in 1618 Germany. As soldiers and plague spread across the Holy Roman Empire at the start of the Thirty Years’ War, 74-year-old Katharina Kepler’s own troubles play out on a grand scale after her neighbor (whom Katharina calls “the Werewolf”) accuses Katharina of poisoning her and manages to convince others that they, too, have been afflicted or targeted by Katharina’s witchcraft. Katharina must fight to clear her name with the help of her three children—her youngest son, a bullheaded pewter guildsman; her daughter, a kindly pastor’s wife; and her eldest son, an expert in horoscopes who works as the Imperial Mathematician—and her kindly, quiet neighbor Simon, who documents Katharina’s case for posterity and risks his own reputation by serving as Katharina’s guardian in court. Mesmerizing details abound, such as the torture inflicted on those accused of witchcraft, and the herbal remedies Katharina relies upon. Galchen portrays her characters as complicated and full of wit as they face down the cruelties dealt to them (a man called “the Cabbage,” demanding Katharina release a curse on his sister, threatens her with a “vain sword... something a nobleman might commission and then reject at the last moment, leaving the sword maker in a bind”). This is a resounding delight. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency.
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March 1, 2021
In 1616 W�rttemberg, widowed Katharina's excellent understanding of herbs helps her treat sick neighbors--until the jealous Ursula accuses Katharina of sickening her with a bitter drink. Her eldest son, Johannes, the Imperial Mathematician celebrated for his work on the laws of planetary motion, comes to her rescue. With a 50,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from April 1, 2021
A 17th-century German witch hunt--really. Katharina Kepler is an old woman when she is accused, by the wife of the town's third-rate glazier, of being a witch. She laughs at the accusation. She has three grown children and a cow named Chamomile. She has a life to live. The accusation, unfortunately, seems to stick, with townspeople emerging, as it were, from the woodwork: A young girl once felt a pain in her arm as Katharina walked by; the schoolmaster once felt a pain in his leg. What one character calls "the destructive power of rumor" gathers momentum--gradually, and then all at once. Galchen's latest book, which is by turns witty, sly, moving, and sharp, is a marvel to behold. Set in the early 1600s and based on real events--Katharina Kepler was Johannes Kepler's mother, who really was tried as a witch--the novel also speaks to our own time in its hints at the apparent malleability of truth. "If only I had understood earlier what was really true," someone says. "It can be so difficult to tell, the way people talk." Galchen's story will, by necessity, remind many readers of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, but by focusing her narrative on an old woman rather than a cast of attractive young girls, she's made her mission a far sneakier one. Then, too, Galchen's prose can sparkle and sting with wit. Katharina's neighbor thinks, "In order to avoid turning people into monsters by suspecting them of being monsters, I do my best to keep myself mostly to myself." There is so much in this novel to consider--the degree to which we make monsters of one another, the way that old age can make of femininity an apparently terrifying, otherworldly thing--but it is also, at every step along the way, an entirely delicious book. Dazzling in its humor, intelligence, and the richness of its created world.COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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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.
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