My Evil Mother

In a 1950s suburb, a fifteen-year-old girl lives with a mother who raises no apology for being single and who may well be a witch. The mother keeps a cauldron and mixes potions.

She makes claims about what she has done to the boy her daughter likes, and about what she could still do. The narrator never manages to work out how much of this is real and how much is show.

The story follows the narrator across her whole life, beyond the teenage years. Her early resentment slowly turns into something harder to name as she grows up and learns more about what her mother was actually dealing with back then.

It arrives at her own daughter's fifteenth birthday, where a familiar pattern is already taking shape around her. This is a short story, not a novel, so it can be read in a single sitting.

Witchcraft works mostly as a way of talking about how much control a mother holds, how much she admits to, and what a daughter can only recognise once she looks back. The mother stays an open question to the end.