“Once there was a perfect town, in a perfect world, where there were rules for everything and a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and nobody ever broke the rules-except sometimes.”
So begins Starhawk’s new eco-fable, The Last Wild Witch. When the wind is in the west, and the last wild Witch is brewing her magic brews and singing her magic songs, some of the wildness might get inside you!
Children will delight to this magical story. Adults will find that Starhawk’s tale is a jumping-off point to explore a vision of a world that honors the wild.
The perfect town in the perfect world, introduced in the first pages of Starhawk’s The Last Wild Witch, could be Any Town, USA: rows of cookie-cutter houses, everyone governed by absolute rules-and kids who can sense that there’s something more out there than just being perfect.
The tale, written in simple language with a rhythm that steadily grows as the story progresses, deals with many issues and questions of deep concern to both children and adults. It touches on the creation of rules, the necessity of some and the arbitrary nature of others, and the eternal difference in worldviews and perceptions between innocence (kids) and experience (adults).
It shows how this affects the ways we choose to live: conformity vs. individualism, engineered town vs. the wilds of nature. How do we let the wildness in-into our lives, to our vision of what community means? How do we recover our sense of being part of the natural world? Can we let nature’s own patterns inform the way we meet our human needs, so that we can heal and regenerate the world around us?
By letting our children lead the way, through their imaginations and affinity with pristine nature, there is hope that we have not sat down to tea with our last wild Witch. These thoughts are brought to life through the shamanistic beat of Starhawk’s words, and the vibrant, swirling art of Lindy Kehoe’s paintings. Readers will see the auras and feel the pulse of their neighborhoods, and discover the beauty of the wildness that waits not too far from their own doorsteps. You might want to read this one aloud, even if you’re by yourself.
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