I felt a similar feeling here, that the only way I'd be satisfied would be with the painful death of the witch.
I remember how helpless I felt in this moment, how I closed my eyes to the horror of this girl's abuse and wished her bastard of a father would collapse dead in that moment on the ground before us. The force of his blows made her fall to the ground with her ears ringing. The daughter, Minx, reminded me far too much of a girl I once knew whose father beat her so badly in front of us kids, right out on the front lawn of my friend's house, that he knocked the barrettes clear off of her head.
The witch seems to represent an abusive single mother who is living in poverty without a partner or a community and the daughter lives a solitary life without friends or advocates and fears her mother's temper, her own starvation and neglect. There is a joyless, abject quality to this 1953 lower grades chapter book, similar in feel to another children's book written 9 years before this one, The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes.
Right around this point, my daughter contributed, “This is like having Bellatrix Lestrange for a mother.” Madam Snickasee also denies her daughter food and screams that she's “useless” and “disobedient” and calls her “stupid girl.” I read through the first few pages, cackling whenever I read Madam Snickasee's part of the dialogue, but after she threw several objects at her daughter and shouted “Sissy!” in her face, I started to get a stomachache. So, we got the book, and I was thrilled that the story was about an actual witch, named Madam Snickasee, who lives with her daughter, Minx, in “the ugliest, most rickety house in town.” We've attempted a few books after finishing Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, but nothing inspired even a spark of interest until a friend on here reviewed Little Witch, and I thought. Searching for the meaning of life in a post-Harry Potter world.
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