I recently picked up “The Witch’s Heart” by Genevieve Gornichec at my local library. I had been recommended this book years back by a friend, but I was never able to find it.
My first experience with Gornichec’s work was in “The Weaver and the Witch Queen,” which I very much enjoyed. Her retelling of the villains of the Icelandic family sagas was refreshing, as was her (although Hollywood-inspired) take on Norse culture.
When I saw the Witch’s Heart on the shelf at my library, I was ecstatic. I snatched it up and quickly added it to my stack of books to take home.
Diving in, I was again struck by Gornichec’s immersion into the Norse world. Though the language and attitudes of the characters were often a bit too modern, the emotional hold the characters have on you really makes up for it.
My entire life, when reading Myth, I have always favored Sigyn as the partner of Loki. She is the one who is faithful to him, and she suffers as he steps out and causes harm to their family’s reputation. So reading about Angbroda was an adjustment at first. However, Gornichec struck a nerve within me somewhere in the middle of the book, and unexpectedly, I found myself crying while trying to have a relaxing read in the bath.
Those who do not know me personally, and those who do may still not know this, but I am the mother of an autistic son. We were incredibly blessed to receive an early diagnosis and begin therapy for him. However, on the road to that diagnosis, we were often baffled by the experiences we had with him. We would be out with our two boys, and something would be out of sorts with our oldest, causing a scene. I’m not sure my husband and I had a meal together in a restaurant for a year and a half. One of us would end up outside walking our son around the parking lot while the other took care of the baby.
There were so many stares, gasps, and comments that people didn’t think we could hear. Sometimes I think they did want us to hear the comments, so that we would feel shamed for ruining their dining/shopping/standing in line at the bank experience.
People looked at my child as an other.
Growing up, I had an alternative style upbringing. Our family traveled practically three hundred days out of the year for my parents’ careers. We grew up in a tour bus, a station wagon, and a Ford Excursion XL pulling a 16-foot trailer. I have an accent and vernacular that ranges from Oklahoma to Belfast, Northern Ireland, and almost every place in between. (When writing my books, I learned there are words I spell in the British style that I never even realized were different from the American spelling.)
I never realized my upbringing was weird until I was on my own, working, living, and dating.
When I met my husband and was introduced to his friends and family, I could see them watching me in bewilderment as I said the most unhinged statements about eating street food with orphans in the Philippines or what it was like to fall out of a tour bus bunk when you hit a Texas-sized pothole.
I was other, but I was grown, and I was adaptable. I learned to laugh off and celebrate these differences, and in time, many of those bewildered stares became questions, and eventually laughter right alongside me.
It didn’t even occur to me that my otherness would prepare me for motherhood. How that rejection would open my wounded heart up in a way that could enfold my two boys in a protective cocoon.
And in the pages of “The Witch’s Heart,” I saw the giantess Angroda do the same.
There was a connection I hadn’t expected with the story, especially as I read the fateful meeting of Sigyn and Angbroda for the first time.
You see, part of being other is that you see people living lives from a different point of view. You see the patterns people have to try and build “normal”, successful lives, and sometimes you see how these patterns have hurt their children. Children who like my son are seen as other.
When Angbroda curses Sigyn with the knowledge of what will befall her sons, I felt so deeply my own anger in that moment. I could see myself standing at functions with my screaming child, hearing advice thrown at me on how we weren’t disciplining him enough, or how we were going to turn him into a monster by letting him get away with this behavior.
I could see myself sitting up with my son through night terrors where he was unable to control his own body and sobbing as I tried to find a way to protect him from people who would see this as a dysfunction.
I wanted to curse all of those people with the knowledge of how othering my child was nothing more than building walls between them and the loved ones who were struggling to understand what made them different. I wanted to hurt them by pointing out their inability to accept others with grace.
I saw in that moment a vicious part of myself that I had wanted to ignore and hide away because I was ashamed of it.
But just as I have learned that having this wild autistic boy and his feral brother is a joy and a blessing, I have also begun to unravel that this side of me isn’t to be ignored either.
Don’t worry, the next time a Karen in the grocery store makes a comment, I’m not going to unleash myself on her. However, I do want to begin to recognize that this fury inside of me is an instinct to protect my sons. To make sure that they don’t sit across from the dinner table from their peers and see the bewilderment that they aren’t the same as a reflection on them.
The story’s overall theme of parents going to apocalyptic levels to protect their children (Even Odin, in the end, is just a parent doing what he thought he needed to protect his son) had me hooked.
So, in short, my review of “The Witch’s Heart” is five stars. Even with my notes on the misleading way Gornichec tells Norse Myth, and the way that she sometimes gives an over feminist slant to an ancient and clearly misogynistic society. (But honestly, who can blame her on that note?) It gets five stars for doing what literature is intended to do. Telling a story that connects with the soul of the reader. It opened me up to a part of myself I had been hiding, and exposed my strength and my weakness in that moment.
So thanks, Genieve, I never thought as a teenager reading the Eddas that I’d be on Broda’s side. But here I am, raising the best damn monsters I can.