Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

By: Grady Hendrix
Pre-order: Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Pre-order for $22.75

Pre-order for $22.75

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

There’s power in a book…

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid...and it’s usually paid in blood.

In Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, the author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group delivers another searing, completely original novel and further cements his status as a “horror master” (NPR).

©2024 Grady Hendrix (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"There's spells, there's witches, and then there's the magic Grady Hendrix conjures up in this amazing novel."–Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of I Was a Teenage Slasher

"Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is terrifying, darkly funny, moving, immersive, and deeply relevant—a page-turner that will keep you up until one in the morning. I devoured every page of it. Grady Hendrix is at the top of his game."–Simone St. James, New York Times bestselling author of Murder Road

"Grady Hendrix again brings to life a fully realized ensemble of characters who you'll cry with and root for while deftly molding the historical novel, the supernatural, and gritty, all-too real life horrors into a morally complex and genuinely haunting and moving tale. I couldn't put it down once I started."–Paul Tremblay, author of Horror Movie and The Cabin at the End of the World

What listeners say about Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.