Sub-Rosa is a reading group that meets once a month to discuss feminist and obscure literature.Our selection for this month is The Wax Child by Olga Ravn. We will meet Saturday, October 25 at 6:30 p.m. at the store. Books are in stock and discounted 15%.
If you are interested in attending please send us your email to bookbeatorders@gmail.com, message Book Beat on Instagram, or inquire in-store.
The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe.
In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man who gives them dark powers: they can steal people’s happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or death. They are all in danger of the stake.
Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of real witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland in the seventeenth century. Full of lush storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn also weaves in quotes from original sources such as letters, magical spells and manuals, court documents, and Scandinavian grimoires.
Restless and convincingly strange.
–Emma Alpern “New York Magazine”
Gripping… This devilishly subversive feminist anthem is one of a kind.
— Publishers Weekly (starred)
Olga Ravn is a master and an alchemist. There’s nobody else doing quite what she does.
–Samantha Harvey
The Wax Child spins its own spellbinding tale of loss and longing as the true story of Christenze Kruckow weaves through language that makes what happened to her, and to so many other women like her, pulse with a clarity more real than fact. A magnificent book. A true masterpiece of both substance and style.
— Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Dark and strange and beautiful and completely gripping
–Mark Haddon
Olga Ravn (born 1986) is a Danish novelist and poet. In collaboration with Danish publisher Gyldendal she edited a selection of Tove Ditlevsen’s texts and books that relaunched Ditlevsen’s readership worldwide. Her novel The Employees was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 2021.
Martin Aitken has translated numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, and Kim Leine. He won the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Love.