The Wax Child — Olga Ravn
Leaf & Lens | A Reader's Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐½ — 4.5 / 5 stars
There are books you read, and then there are books that happen to you. The Wax Child is the second kind. I picked it up thinking I was walking into a historical witchcraft story set in 17th century Denmark and I was, technically. But what Olga Ravn actually hands you is something far stranger, far quieter, and in the end, far more unsettling than any conventional witch trial narrative has the courage to be.
Who Is Telling This Story?
The narrator is a wax doll. Not a person, not a ghost a doll, fashioned by Christenze Kruckow, a poor but noble unmarried woman living in Jutland, Denmark, in 1615. The doll can see everything across time, across space, across the worm-riddled earth it eventually lies buried in. It remembers the streets where it was made. It has witnessed the insides of kings. It speaks in riddles and certainties at once.
That alone should tell you whether this book is for you or not.
Christenze's story is true or rather, it is rooted in truth. She was a real woman, accused of witchcraft three times across her life, and the creation of a wax figure was among the allegations levelled against her. Ravn takes that documented fragment and builds an entire haunted world around it one where the wax child becomes the only narrator we can trust, and also the least reliable one we'll ever meet.
The World Ravn Builds
What I wasn't prepared for was how lived-in this world feels despite being under 200 pages. Ravn doesn't dump you into 17th-century Denmark with a history lesson. She drops you into the smell of fish guts and candle tallow, into the laughter of women carding wool side by side, into a community of four women Christenze, Maren, Dorte, Apelone who practice rituals that may or may not be witchcraft, and who probably don't care about the distinction.
That ambiguity is deliberate and it is brilliant. Ravn never tells you whether these women are actually casting spells or simply living with a deep, inherited knowledge of herbs, bodies, and the natural world. And because she refuses to clarify, the story feels genuinely ancient like you've stumbled into something that predates the need for explanation.
The novel is split into two halves: Christenze's life before the accusations find her, and her life after she flees to Aalborg. The first half has warmth in it real warmth. Women laughing, dancing, sharing wine, looking out for each other. There's Elisabeth, trapped in a marriage to a priest who isolates and abuses her, and there are Christenze and her friends trying, quietly, desperately, to pull her toward the light. The magic here isn't sorcery it's solidarity.
The second half gets darker. The King of Denmark is intensifying his witch-hunt campaign. The accusations pile up. The arrests come. And the wax child watches all of it with that terrifying calm because it already knows how it ends.
The Writing
Ravn is first and foremost a poet, and it shows in every sentence. The prose translated here from Danish by Martin Aitken doesn't move in straight lines. It spirals. It doubles back. There are passages that read like incantations and passages that land like gut punches. "How do I know this? It is like a wound in me to know it." I read that line three times in a row. I still think about it.
The wax child's voice is singular. It speaks in a way that is ancient and immediate at the same time, seamlessly moving from the mundane to the cosmic without ever feeling forced. Aitken's translation deserves enormous credit here this kind of prose poetry is notoriously difficult to carry between languages, and the English version hums with the same eerie rhythm you sense is there in the original Danish.
That said and this is a mild gripe there are stretches where the elliptical quality of the narration tips into genuine opacity. The wax child drifts, and sometimes you drift with it in a way that feels purposeful and dreamlike. Other times you simply feel lost and wish the narrative would just hold still for a moment. It doesn't always. This book asks for patience and trust, and not every reader will want to give both.
What Stayed With Me
The theme at the core of this book is one that feels ancient and completely, exhaustingly contemporary: women who refuse to conform get destroyed for it. Christenze has no desire to marry, no interest in fitting the shape society has cut out for her and that freedom, that unbothered independence, is precisely what makes her dangerous in the eyes of those around her. Anne, the woman who first accuses her, doesn't accuse her out of genuine fear of witchcraft. She accuses her because Christenze's contentment is an affront to her own misery.
That's the real horror of the book. Not the wax doll. Not the trials or the executions though those are horrifying in their own right. The horror is how little has changed in the logic of it. The machinery that destroys these women is made of fear, resentment, and the discomfort powerful men feel when women form bonds they cannot control.
And the wax child watches all of it. It passes from hand to hand. It carries the story forward because someone has to.
The Discomforts
I want to be honest: this book is not an easy read, and not entirely because of its darkness. The deliberate refusal to give clarity which is also its greatest strength can make certain sections feel like wading through fog. There were moments I wanted the narrative to be sharper, more anchored, and I had to consciously let go of that want and surrender to the book's logic on its own terms. Once I did, it clicked. But it takes a particular kind of reading mood, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I pretended otherwise.
Final Thoughts
The Wax Child is a novella fierce, strange, and genuinely unlike most things I've read. It doesn't explain itself. It doesn't comfort you. It buries itself in your chest like a wax figure pressed with hair and teeth, and it stays there. Olga Ravn writes like someone who believes deeply that objects remember, that the earth listens, and that stories told by the silenced are the only ones worth trusting.
If you want neat, this isn't it. But if you want a book that feels like it was written by candlelight in a language older than the one it was printed in pick this up, clear an evening, and let it take you somewhere unsettling and necessary.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐½
For readers who love: Samanta Schweblin, Han Kang, Sara Stridsberg and anyone who has ever felt the specific, quiet fury of being called difficult.