Rec'd via Bookmooch.com!

--

Cats. Jessica's never liked them. Especially not a skinny, ugly kitten that looks like a worm. Worm. Jessica wishes she'd never brought Worm home with her, because now he's making her do terrible things. She's sure she isn't imagining the evil voice coming from the cat, telling her to play mean tricks on people. But how can she explain what's happening?

Witches. Jessica has read enough books to know that Worm must be a witch's cat. He's cast a spell on her, but whom can she turn to? After all, no one will believe that Worm has bewitched her...or worse!

Started reading two days ago.

Finished this morning.

An interesting story with an unreliable narrator, The Witches of Worm is the story of a twelve-year-old girl who becomes convinced the kitten she found abandoned outside has possessed her and forced her to play mean tricks on other people.

When we meet her, Jessica is clearly a lonely child. She quickly reveals that her mother is a single parent and rarely home, spending her days at work and her evenings on dates with a series of men (none of whom seem to have made any impression on Jessica). The distance between parent and child is felt in the way Jessica calls her mother by her first name rather "Mom" or "Mommy". Jessica has also been abandoned by her friends, who replaced her with "better" friends or ditched after one too many fights.

It's clear throughout the story - though remember, I'm reading as an adult and not as a kid - that Jessica is troubled. She's extremely isolated, and hostile to most of the people in her life. Her mother probably loves her, but she doesn't express it well. She goes on dates, leaving her child in an empty apartment, and when she's home she's nearly always got a drink in her hand. I get that this was a different time and drinking cocktails in the home perhaps more socially acceptable than it is today, but for better or worse Joy has more or less given up on parenting her daughter. At one point in the past, she did take her daughter to see a psychiatrist, which we know because Jessica mentions it as she describes all the tricks she knows to use so that the school counselor won't know that there's anything wrong.

(Side note: I wonder if the bad mother trope appears in all of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's books? I seem to recall that in The Egypt Game, the main character constantly pined after her movie star mother who foisted her on some other relation while she whined and dined her way from one fabulous setting to the next.)

The main mystery of the story is whether Worm the cat does have any supernatural powers, and if so how is he influencing Jessica's actions? Again, as an adult, it seems quite clear that Worm's "powers" are all in Jessica's imagination, a sort of hallucination she makes up in her depression and loneliness to regain some sort of power over her situation. I don't know if a kid would read it that way.

Jessica's ideas about Worm are largely sparked by a book she reads about the Salem witch trials, which introduces her to Ann Putnam, who claimed a witch possessed her and whose testimony sent innocent people to the gallows. As an adult, Ann later confessed that she'd lied and made it all up. I'm not 100% sure if, by the end of the book, Jessica fully comprehends that she's imagined the whole thing, or merely believes that a ritual has freed her and Worm from demonic influence, but she must own up to her own problems and begin to re-engage with the world.

It's a solid book, well-written and interesting. I don't know if children will pick up on all of the subtleties. In fact, I would love to read it with the kids in my middle grade book club and see what they make of it.

sent to Caliente, NV to fulfill a request on Bookmooch!