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.
What holds the book together, more than the mystery of the missing girls, is the friendship between Ava and Lauren, and Hoffman doesn't let it stay simple. Their bond gets tested by the same things that bind them: new power, secrecy, and love, and Hoffman makes you feel how much is riding on a trust neither one expected to need. Female friendship gets called complicated in book club fiction so often the word has gone soft, but here it actually is: loyalty and rivalry running on the same wire.
The dual timeline occasionally trips over its own ambition. The historical letters, most effective when they stay oblique, sometimes tip into stating the book's argument outright, and a line or two about women and the men who fear them reads more like a thesis than something a character would actually write down. The pacing loosens in the middle as well, when the campus scenes lean on atmosphere a beat longer than the mystery can support. Neither problem sinks the book, but a reader hunting for propulsion in every chapter will notice the stretches where mood does more work than plot.
Where Hoffman really delivers is in the texture of Radcliffe itself: the particular cruelty of being the smart girl from nowhere, the particular danger of being the rich girl everyone assumes has it easy. She's written witches before, more famously and more warmly in Practical Magic, but this book has different weather, colder and more political, more interested in the machinery that decides who gets called dangerous. The magic here is never really the point. It's the excuse men have always needed to name a woman's power something else.
Why you should read
- Great if you love campus novels with real magic underneath
- Great if you want witch-trial history read as feminist allegory
- Great if Practical Magic left you wanting Hoffman's colder register
- Great if slow-building friendship stories hold your attention
What to expect
- An older, witch-trial-era voice running under the 1950s story
- Atmosphere and world-building ahead of a fast-moving plot
- A central friendship built on loyalty and real rivalry
- A few passages that state the book's argument outright
By the time girls from the Society start vanishing, the book has already taught you not to expect the college, or the decade, to protect them. This is the argument the series opens on: history doesn't warn you before it repeats, it only changes the name on the accusation and waits to see who answers to it this time. Whatever Hoffman has planned for book two, Cambridge clearly isn't finished confessing.
