The Protagonist Witch in Two YA Fantasy Novels

The teen witches in young adult fantasy often possess magical abilities related to nature. In Rachel Griffin’s The Nature of Witches (2021), witch student Clara must learn to control her power over the weather as the last hope in the face of devastating climate change. In This Poison Heart (2021) by Kalynn Bayron, budding botanist Briseis can grow a seedling into a tree in moments and withstand the world’s most poisonous plants. Both Clara and Briseis use their abilities for community benefit, manipulating nature for medicine and protection. As teenagers their social power is volatile. As witches they are invaluable to their societies. Roberta Seelinger Trites identifies young adult literature as a place of power imbalance that allows young adult readers to explore their own social power within the safety of the text. Through an ecofeminist lens, this article explores the disconnect between Clara and Briseis’s status as adolescents and the social power gained through witchcraft. It considers how the protagonist witches employ their powers over nature to make a place for themselves (and the natural) within a community. I argue that the renegotiation of western ideological binaries in these texts is impeded by didactic socialisation within the young adult genre.