Bingo square ‘Bodies, Bodies’: The main character has to deal with the uncontrollable nature of her own body and its possibly controllable impulses, and there’s also discussion of how men feel entitled to women’s bodies and reducing women to bodies.
Hexed (2021) is a witchy YA book and a fun short-ish read. After being forced to move around a lot by her slightly flaky mother, Jessie Jones has just started at a new high school near her family’s roots on the Isle of Wight (a small island off the south coast of England populated by fairly rural locals and seasonal tourists), where casual toxic masculinity and mean girls are the norm. She starts getting period cramps in class just as Callum, the golden-boy son of the local MP is being particularly misogynistic–and his face suddenly explodes into acne.
Jessie learns shortly afterwards that her family (her mother, grandmother, and popular influencer sister) are all witches–the question is how to make that work, and live a normal life as a teenage girl, and also fix things at her school without going on a destructive revenge rampage. This is not an unusual setup–so far, so Sabrina (who does get namechecked, along with Willow from Buffy and The Craft).
Clearly, magicking an actual living, breathing chick out of an egg was beyond my limited skill set, which was fair enough. Maybe I should try something simpler, more straightforward, less God-like than creating life. I dug out a (miraculously) clean frying pan, cracked the egg into it and tired accessing my fickle magic one last time. I focused on the raw, runny egg so hard my eyeballs nearly popped out, imagining it cooking, the heat, the white actually turning white, the taste of a freshly fried egg. I closed my eyes, put my hand on my abdomen, desperately trying to channel all my period-based witchiness into creating a tasty fried snack.
A ripple of cramp; that was good.
A teeny-tiny chirrup; that was bad. (p. 71)
What makes this more unusual are
a) the detailed period stuff–blood, cramps, moods, etc.–this isn’t some dainty wispy nod to the liminal magic of puberty
b) the family dynamics–Jessie doesn’t have to hide her powers from those closest to her, but she does have to figure out how to let her family come close enough to her to help her
c) the explicit tying of high school politics to real-world politics: patriarchy is not monsterised and metaphorised, it’s everyday structures of power, everyday boys in school, and their soccer coaches, and their headmaster, and their Member of Parliament, and their Prime Minister, and a President on the other side of the Atlantic
Overall, Hexed is a little more straightforward and unsubtle than I would have liked (but then, I am not a Young Adult), and it’s not really clear what the title is referring to–if I remember correctly, the concept of a hex is never really unpacked. However, it is, again, a fun and straightforward read–Jessie is a believably teenaged wry, sometimes surly, narrator, and there’s some nice atmosphere to do with the sea and terrain, and humour. I will probably read the sequel at some point.