Book of the Day

From the review

Ava arrives at Radcliffe College from a small town in Maine, and Lauren is the wild, brazen daughter of a wealthy old Cambridge family. Alice Hoffman puts the two of them in the same freshman class and lets the friction do the work: an outsider and an heiress, opposites in almost every way, drawn together by something neither one asked for. The Witches of Cambridge, the opening book in a new series from the author of Practical Magic, recruits them both into the Lilith Society, a coven that has operated inside Radcliffe, unnoticed, since the colony's earliest and ugliest years. This is historical fiction that puts its magic to work instead of hanging it on the wall for decoration. Hoffman lets an older voice run underneath the 1950s campus story, one that reaches back to the colony's witch-trial years, when women were drowned and the Lilith Society first began to meet. It's a bold structural bet, and mostly it pays off. Reading Ava and Lauren's story against those older pages, you feel the weight of repetition rather than just being told about it: the same accusations, dressed in a new decade's clothing, the same men deciding which women are dangerous enough to watch. McCarthyism hangs over Cambridge like the trials never really adjourned, only moved to a different building.