Read an Excerpt From The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman

There's something deliciously subversive about setting a witch coven in 1950s Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hoffman isn't just writing historical fantasy—she's conducting a forensic excavation of an era we've romanticized into sterility. The Lilith Society, named for the biblical figure who refused to submit, becomes a perfect metaphor for the underground networks of women who kept the embers of rebellion alive during the most conformist decade in American history. These aren't your gothic, broomstick-riding stereotypes; they're brilliant scholars and thinkers who've learned that in a world that denies them the podium, the kitchen table becomes a parliament. What fascinates me most is the temporal collision Hoffman engineers. The 1950s are often framed as the pre-digital dark ages of American culture—yet here we see that the occult was always a kind of parallel technology, a system of knowledge transmission that bypassed the patriarchal institutions of the university and the laboratory. The Lilith Society operates like an underground mesh network, passing encrypted wisdom through recipes, embroidery, and whispered conversations. It's a reminder that every era has its shadow infrastructure, its alternative channels of information flow. The choice of Cambridge is no accident either. This is the epicenter of American intellectualism, home to Harvard and MIT, the very citadels of rational, masculine thought. By planting her witches in the shadow of these institutions, Hoffman stages a quiet insurrection—a claim that the most rigorous forms of knowledge aren't always found in ivy-covered halls. It's a theme that resonates powerfully with our own moment, as we grapple with what counts as legitimate expertise in an age of algorithmic authority and contested truths. For readers of Starfall Weekly, this excerpt offers a compelling case study in how speculative fiction can interrogate historical memory. Hoffman asks us to consider: what if the witch hunts never really ended, but merely changed costumes? What if the women who were burned, drowned, and hanged in earlier centuries simply learned to code their magic in more socially acceptable forms? The Lilith Society is that coded language, a survival mechanism that transforms persecution into power. I'll be watching this novel closely—it promises to be a vital addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative historical fiction. Source: https://reactormag.com/excerpts-the-witches-of-cambridge-by-alice-hoffman/