The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman (The Witches of Cambridge, #1) * * *

I read The Witches of Cambridge by Alice Hoffman as part of the 2026 PopSugar Reading Challenge, for prompt number 33, "a book about college". I also made it the first book of my October 2026 Read Witch-a-Thon, so I was killing two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, this was not the strongest start to my witchy reading month.

I think this is another case where the blurb gave me a very different idea of the book I was going to read. Based on the description, I imagined two young witches arriving at Radcliffe College in 1950s Cambridge, joining Lilith House, essentially a sorority house for witches, and then realizing that girls from the society were disappearing. Naturally, I assumed Ava and Lauren would team up to figure out what was happening.

This was my first Alice Hoffman novel, although of course I knew her as the author of Practical Magic, and it is immediately obvious why she has had such a long career. Her prose is gorgeous. The descriptions of Cambridge, the changing seasons, the natural world, and magic give the entire novel a dreamy, almost timeless quality. The book is extraordinarily atmospheric. There were also several genuinely emotional moments that made me tear up because Hoffman can describe grief, love, and loss with remarkable tenderness.

That contrast made the book especially frustrating for me. I could be bored by what was happening while simultaneously admiring the sentence telling me about it.

There are also some genuinely interesting ideas underneath the story. Setting the book during the McCarthy era allows Hoffman to draw a parallel between historical witch hunts and the political witch hunts of the 1950s. The Lilith Society itself gives women who are considered strange or dangerous a place where those same qualities are accepted. The seventeenth century storyline then stretches those ideas backwards, showing how easily fear of women who refuse to conform can become persecution. I liked all of that. I simply wanted those ideas attached to a stronger central narrative.

And perhaps that is ultimately my problem with The Witches of Cambridge. There are so many ingredients here that I should have loved. Witches. A secret women's society. A historical university setting. Female friendship. Letters from a seventeenth century witch. Family secrets. Magic. Murder and disappearances. This sounds like something designed specifically for me.

Instead, I fell asleep reading it three times.

I gave The Witches of Cambridge three stars. I do not think it is a bad book at all. In fact, there are parts of it that are exceptionally well written, and readers who love slow, atmospheric, character driven magical realism may get much more from it than I did. But I wanted more story. I wanted the disappearing witches to matter. I wanted more of Lauren. I wanted the college setting to be more than scenery. Most of all, I wanted something to happen that I had not already seen many times before.

Strangely enough, I think this could make a very good movie. The fragmented structure that frustrated me on the page could work beautifully onscreen, where changing seasons, locations, clothes, music, and visual transitions could communicate the passage of years without making the story feel quite so disjointed. There were even moments when it vaguely reminded me of Mona Lisa Smile, although I have not seen that film in decades.

So my first Read Witch-a-Thon book was a bit of a disappointment. Beautiful prose, beautiful atmosphere, some genuinely moving moments, and plenty of witchy potential, but underneath all that beauty was a story I had seen before and a plot that moved so slowly I occasionally went to sleep waiting for it to catch up.

Sometimes beautiful writing can make a story magical. Unfortunately, it cannot make a boring story exciting.