What happens when 19th-century women skilled in the science of plants and other healing arts are vilified and driven from their community? They flee to a remote South Florida island and set about exacting their revenge on unwitting passersby, of course. To do this, they conjure dark miasmic clouds that cut off the electricity and block the only exit from the island. And if anyone attempts to escape by sea, they find themselves inevitably pulled under. Permanently. But when a group of high school seniors arrives for a week before going off to college—each with baggage and a secret of their own—the island’s power tables get turned.
So Witches We Became, a YA horror novel by Jill Baguchinsky, combines the supernatural, a queer romance and suppressed trauma to tell a fast-paced and cathartic feminist story about collective healing and reclaiming power.
While numerous groundbreaking YA novels, many published in the ’90s, opened the door to YA books dealing with the effects of sexual assault and the power of breaking silence, they generally focused on individual girls and their recovery journeys. These groundbreaking examples include Push by Sapphire, about a teenage girl growing up in Harlem who is raped by her father and ends up pregnant, and Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, a story about a girl who almost completely stops speaking after being raped by an upperclassman.
More recently the genre of sexual assault and recovery has evolved and opened up to include narratives about reclaiming power collectively. Books like The Luis Ortega Survival Club (2023) by Sonora Reyes and The Nowhere Girls (2017) by Amy Reed are two examples that offer narratives about groups of friends who band together to avenge their abusers, express their rage and reclaim their power.
Like these other stories, So Witches We Became underscores the power of solidarity.
The story opens with the main character experiencing night terrors and paralysis, something her therapist connects to her mother abandoning the family. Every night, Nell sees shadows in the corner of her room, and panic sets in. The story flashes forward to a weekend years later, when Nell is a senior, and plans to go to St. Felicitus, an island off South Florida nicknamed ‘the island of no storms’ because it always seems to dodge hurricanes, for summer vacation with a group of friends including Harper, her former best friend, before they all scatter in different directions for college.
The social dynamics get interesting when Harper’s boyfriend drops in unannounced, and when the vacation cottage owner’s butch daughter Tris meets Nell, sparking mutual flirtation. But just as their romance gets underway, things on the island get weird. The air turns acrid. Strange music wafts through the air. A miasmic dark fugue engulfs the gate at the end of the road, the only way to exit the island. Each day it grows bigger and bigger. The group panics and acts impulsively.
Through it all, Nell grapples with a secret of her own, one she doesn’t tell anyone about—not even Tris—until she realizes that the secret’s power must be dispelled and the only way to do this is with everyone’s help.
Ms. talked with Baguchinsky about what inspired her to tell a story about witches, friendship and recovery from sexual assault and rape.
Leslie Absher: You write in the back of the book that you know many people who’ve experienced sexual violations. This is what holds back Nell, the protagonist, but also many other characters. Why did you decide to write about sexual abuse/violation and collective recovery?
Jill Baguchinsky: I started off writing a completely different book—I’d just been through Hurricane Irma in 2017, and I thought I was writing a hurricane book, a disaster thriller about a group of teenagers surviving a monster storm. When I started drafting So Witches We Became in 2018, the popular discourse was full of topics like “locker room talk” or “boys will be boys”—some pretty vile behavior was being excused. Brock Turner was appealing his assault conviction. A president who’d once been caught bragging about grabbing women by the genitalia was appointing an alleged assaulter to the Supreme Court. Victims were speaking up, putting their experiences out there, and being met with disbelief, vitriol and threats. And just… come on.
I couldn’t stop thinking of how many people have trusted me with recollections of their own experiences, and how often those types of experiences are downplayed, doubted or dismissed. The more I thought about that—the violence, the assault, the harassment, the lack of consequence—the more I realized that my hurricane book needed to go in another direction and focus on a different kind of villain.
Discussions of assault aren’t easy, but they’re so necessary.
Absher: The book invigorates the theme of witch-as-healer, underscoring how historically women have been vilified and killed for their connection to the natural world. It feels vital to keep telling this story and doing it in a contemporary YA book. Was that something that motivated you?
Baguchinsky: That absolutely motivated me. I wanted each of my witches to find the first spark of their power in some talent or gift they brought with them to the island—something that starts as a hobby and becomes more.
For Tris, that talent lies in her connection to the island’s plants and trees. Some of that talent involves knowledge she’s learned from her family, like when she knows which herbs to brew into a tea to help calm an injured character. But some of it is innate, instinctual. I find that sort of thing fascinating. Sometimes you’re just good at something, and when you continue to learn about it and play with it, you can nurture that initial spark into so much more. Eventually, all the main characters in So Witches do this, finding ways to weave their talents together into a force of nature much larger than anything they could create on their own.
Outsiders still get targeted today. Persecution has changed shape, but it certainly hasn’t gone away.
Jill Baguchinsky
People used to accuse healers—usually women—of witchcraft, but they also often relied on those healers for help with illnesses or injuries. When those women were useful, they were sought out and accepted, or at least tolerated. Otherwise, they were often handy scapegoats and easy targets. It’s tempting to think of that as practically ancient history, but outsiders still get targeted today. Persecution has changed shape, but it certainly hasn’t gone away.
Absher: I also appreciated the queer romance in ‘So Witches We Became.’ What was important to you about including their romance and the way it unfolded?
Baguchinsky: Their connection developed so naturally for me. I knew I wanted a local character to balance out my group of visiting spring breakers; I needed someone familiar with life on the coast to introduce information about hurricane prep and survival. That was Tris’ origin, but as soon as she showed up on the page, I knew she and Nell would connect. I nurtured the evolution of their romance as a way to balance out the rage and fear in the rest of the book. There needs to be some hope amid the darkness, especially in a story for younger readers, and I think the Nell/Tris storyline delivers that.
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