Consensual Hex

May 1, 2020

Raped without redress, first-year Smith student Lee forms a coven with three other students in her "Gender, Power, and Witchcraft" seminar. Soon they realize that Amherst frat boys are using magic to cover up sexual violence and swing contentiously toward vigilante justice. A genre-blending debut; a 45,000-copy first printing.

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August 17, 2020
Harlowe’s debut offers a sinister if diffuse take on campus date rape. Leisl is ambivalent about a lot of things—her sexuality, her career aspirations, even her desire to attend college in the first place—as she arrives at Smith College for her first year. She attends a meeting of Smithies Against Sexual Violence, where she meets Tripp, a self-described male ally from Amherst—who proceeds to invite her on a date, get her drunk, and take advantage of her in a public restroom. Confused, lonely, and initially unwilling to report the assault as she comes to realize she was raped, Leisl joins the Gender, Power, and Witchcraft seminar, which turns out to be a front for the practice of witchcraft itself. Tripp, meanwhile, is not only a serial rapist but also a warlock, along with his frat buddies. A revenge plot and a love triangle play out in tandem among Leisl and the other members of her seminar’s coven, and as their freshman year devolves into an increasingly surreal and gory fever dream, readers are left to discern what of Leisl’s story is real, what is imagined, and what is a metaphor for sexual violence and its aftermath. Given the recent glut of novels that cast witchcraft as a potent representation of women’s power and rage, this one feels underpowered. Lucy Cleland, Kneerim & Williams.

August 15, 2020
When Leisl Davis begins her first year at Smith College, she gets a spot in a competitive seminar on the history of witchcraft that turns out to be more practical than she could have ever imagined. Leisl isn't doing so well when she moves into her dorm at Smith. She battles with suicidal tendencies and self-loathing and is trying desperately to convince herself that she isn't attracted to girls. She meets a friendly, handsome Amherst student named Tripp, but when he rapes her, she is denied support or even validation from school or the authorities. Leisl befriends Luna, another of Tripp's victims, and immediately feels an attraction. They sign up for a seminar led by the enigmatic professor Sienna Weiss, who whittles the course down to Liesl, Luna, and two other girls, Gabi and Charlotte. Sienna reveals to the students that they are not a class, they are a coven, and under her guidance they learn how to perform real magic. They progress quickly, but their bond is complicated when Luna and Gabi start dating and Leisl cannot contain her jealousy, nor her untreated PTSD. When the coven learns that Tripp and his Amherst frat buddies have somehow developed magical powers of their own, Leisl drives the coven to take justice into their own hands. This debut is a bit rough around the edges but is often quite brilliant, particularly when Leisl reflects on the ways women and girls are demonized simply for protecting themselves: "might you see that, in order to be safe in houses of God, much less the untamed wild of streets and bars, we must grow snakes from our scalps and learn to turn men to stone--just to go outside?" Harlowe writes Leisl's point of view in rushing, furious sentences, depicting her increasingly fraught mental state while also leaving room for friendship, love, and healing in the slightly uneven ending. An intense, unflinching, and supernatural coming-of-age tale.

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