The Witches of Cambridge, by Alice Hoffman | Free Audiobook
Radcliffe, 1950, and a society older than the college
Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the start of the nineteen fifties. Ava Abbott and Lauren arrive at Radcliffe as two of the cleverest women of their year, at a moment when being clever and being a woman were still treated as a combination requiring supervision. What they find on campus is the Lilith Society, which has been meeting quietly since colonial times and has never much cared what the college thought of it.
The friendship is the engine of the book. So is what the Society turns out to be, and what it costs to belong to it. Then the members start going missing, one at a time, in a country currently busy compiling lists of people whose loyalty is in question. Alice Hoffman has set a story about accusing women of witchcraft inside the decade America spent accusing people of everything else, and the parallel is the whole design rather than a decoration.
Behind it all sits Salem, and the Mather family, whose names come out of the actual record of the trials. Hoffman wrote Practical Magic thirty years ago and this begins a new series in the same territory, so the debt is paid openly. Twelve hours and fifty minutes, read by Mena Suvari.
Hoffman has been writing about American witches for three decades and this is her going back for the roots of it. Radcliffe in the McCarthy years, a secret society older than the college, and young women disappearing while the country is preoccupied with a different kind of accusation. It sits at 4.05 on Goodreads and the split in the reactions is easy to predict once you know what kind of a book it is.
The idea underneath it is sharper than the cover suggests. Setting a story about hunting witches inside the years America spent hunting communists is not subtle, and Hoffman does not pretend otherwise, but she gets real value out of the rhyme: the machinery of an accusation, who is believed, what happens to a woman who is conspicuously good at something. The Mather names come straight out of the Salem record, which keeps the whole thing anchored to a real event rather than floating in generic New England mist.
What people are praising is the atmosphere and the friendship. Ava and Lauren carry the book, the Cambridge of seventy years ago is drawn with the specificity Hoffman is known for, and the historical layering has landed well with the audience that came for Practical Magic. Four out of five on Goodreads across a few hundred early votes tells you it is working for the people it was aimed at.
What people are complaining about is momentum, and you should take it seriously before committing thirteen hours. Several early reviewers found the plot slow to move, the characters flatter than the premise deserves, and the digressions frequent enough to break the spell. This is a Hoffman novel, which means texture before pace, and the disappearances that sound like a thriller in the description are not run like one. Arrive wanting a mystery solved at speed and you will be irritated by the middle.
On the narration I am going to be straight with you: Mena Suvari is an actress rather than a career narrator, her casting was newsworthy enough that the trade press covered it, and the recording is too new for a real body of listener verdicts. I would rather tell you that than invent an opinion. If witchcraft in an academic setting is what draws you, The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia works similar ground with a colder edge, and if it is the long friendship between two women across a difficult era, The Lion Women of Tehran does that beautifully.
The Witches of Cambridge, by Alice Hoffman puts Ava Abbott and Lauren inside the Lilith Society at Radcliffe in the nineteen fifties, a circle of witches that has been meeting since colonial times. Then its members start to disappear, in a decade when America already had a great appetite for naming names.
You can start it on a free trial, cancellable whenever you like. Read by Mena Suvari, it runs 12 hours and 50 minutes, and it opens a new series from the author of Practical Magic. A Read with Jenna pick for September.
Cancel the trial and The Witches of Cambridge stays yours. The trial opens the rest of the catalogue too. Salem is closer than anyone in this book would like. Press play.
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US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
