"The wax child" by Olga Ravn (Viking, 2025)

170 pages (many not full). The notes (2 pages) say that it's based on Nordic folklore and historal sources, mostly from around 1600.

Initially, the "I" is a wax effigy owned by Christenze. In the 1600s, Anne has lost 15 infants. Christenze, a noble, is blamed. She runs away to Aalborg where she becomes close to some women who are distrusted. Christenze is arrested. The doll's looked after by Karen, Maren's youngest daughter, 9. Christenze, Maren, Dorte and Apelone are all accused of witchcraft. Karen is a witness. The effigy thinks "I was allowed to experience the wonder of weeping, for her tears fell upon my cheek as if they were mine" (p.103). In court, women show signs of being possessed. Maren is sentenced to death by burning. Later Dorte and Apelone are burned. Christenze is transported back to Copenhagen, the wax effigy back with her. She talks with Kirsten, the pregnant queen, who asks for advice. She meets the blindfolded king, who knows who she is. Because of her status she's beheaded rather than burned. The severed head speaks.

The language has fevered moments -

• I saw goldsmiths' stalls and sheeny lemons in wooden crates. Now and then, I turned my back on progress. Everything throws, when entering the path of the sun, a shadow. Time too has its shadow, the ages of man (p.26)
• the needle of St.Botolph's spire pierces the tongue of the sky. The wind moves over tracts of land to which no one yet lays claim. One by one, the decades pass over me like the wind upon the fjord (p.74)
• Were I not a wax child, I think I could have been a wound (p.83)
• Now it comes to me in a vision - a blazing field of red mirrors advancing from the sea towards the coast, the rain shower's dale. A mussel's shell with a human skull for its pearl (p.85)
• How do I know this? The dead fly in the window-sill told me. the grass-pollen as if puffed into the air told me, a brass candlestick told me, a speck of grit. Everything remembers and speaks to those who will listen (p.123)
• Bloody milk of the sick cow upon the ant-hill. Oil in water, fox-teeth by the mouth of the child, flesh and blood of Christ in the fist, under the palate, a yearning, a whole never made light, a fray-boggard, the rosemary bush - dust-covered, kingly in its anticipation, every smallest lance-shaped leaf (p.155)

Other reviews

• Aida Edemariam (There is an argument that this type of feminine group magic is a form of psychological release in a world where this was hard to come by; it certainly stands in stark contrast to the public male narrative according to which the women are tried. ... At its best The Wax Child is richly evocative, beautiful, creepy and visceral. “It is the darkest of times, December. From the curvature of the earth, minutes run like droplets from the day.” At other times, there’s a bit too much research just out of sight; the novel can feel elliptical, even baffling. One misses the space, the clarity and freedom of The Employees. But maybe that’s the thing about weaving spells. About poetry, too: demand it makes neat sense, and you begin to have too much in common with the witch-hunters.)
• karissareadsbooks
• Ian Mond (The wax doll, still alive and buried in dirt, unable to weep or speak, does not understand her mistress’s final soliloquy. “I am only a doll,” it tells us, not for the first time. “A child of wax.” Yet we hear Christenze. We understand that neither she nor her friends are defined by how they died, but by the intimacy they shared.)