Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which award-winning author Rivka Galchen’s writing is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a tale for our time—the story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear. The year is 1619, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katherina Kepler is accused of being a witch. An illiterate widow, Katherina is known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It’s enough to make anyone jealous, and Katherina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone’s business. So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katherina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katherina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katherina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katherina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets. Provocative and entertaining, Galchen’s bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society, and a family, undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

NUBClub generally liked this work of historical fiction set in the time of Johannes Kepler. What we discovered in that the story really centered on a single relationship: Katherina, the elderly woman accused of being a witch by her neighbors, and Simon, her widower neighbor who acts as her advocate for a time. What Galchen does excellently in this novel is depict these small relationships: how it's really petty greed on the part of another neighbor that kicks of the accusations in the first place, that Katherina shaming the local official on acting incorrect expands her problem rather than ending it, that people take sides and switch them over very personal and idiosyncratic views of morality and honestly and risk. The relationship with Simon is particularly well-rendered as both his friendship with Katherina and his own concerns over the well-being of his children put him in a very small but very believable and empathetic quandary. Katherina is also a very compelling character; you can see how her refusal to live up to the expectations of old women and her inability to keep her mouth shut and stay out of people's business leads to an opening to defamation. We all found the world and its petty politics compelling, and we liked the Galchen kept her view pretty narrow and stayed in a set of very local stories. Belief and science also weave through the book in interesting and historically accurate ways, as questions about whether witches even exist are raised while almost anyone will take a horoscope from Johannes if they can get it. Overall, we really liked this novel. It's not a blockbuster in terms of plot or themes, but it's a very well constructed and told story about how humans treat each other and what politics and gossip do to people's lives, and on those terms, we recommend it.