My Evil Mother

Suburbia in the 1950s is not a forgiving place to be fifteen, and it is less forgiving still when your mother is single, unembarrassed about it, and quite possibly a witch. She keeps a cauldron. She mixes things. She makes claims about what she has done to the boy the narrator likes, and about what she could do, and the narrator can never establish how much of it is performance.

Margaret Atwood carries the story forward across a life. The resentment of the teenage years gives way to something more complicated as the narrator grows up, learns more about what her mother was actually managing in those years, and arrives eventually at her own daughter's fifteenth birthday with a familiar dynamic assembling itself around her.

A short story rather than a novel, and one that treats witchcraft mostly as a way of talking about how much control a mother exerts, how much she admits to, and what a daughter is able to recognise only in retrospect.