Review: The Wax Child by Olga Ravn

translated by Martin Aitken

original publication (in Danish): 2023

first English edition: 2025, New Directions

144 pages

grab a copy here or through your local independent bookstore or library

This small, strange, polyphonic book refuses to settle down into something knowable. As someone who’s learned about and read multiple texts about the (American) witch hunts of the 17th century, I, understandably, approached this novel about a woman and her friends accused of witchcraft with the belief that The Wax Child would offer yet another narrative of doubt and criticism. Of course these women weren’t going to be witches because such accusations were often unfounded and those who were accused were just scapegoats for the fears of a community.

Ravn, whose intriguing short novel The Employees (2022) about humans and humanoid robots exploring a strange planet, is nothing if not aggressively imaginative. From the beginning, The Wax Child unsettles our assumptions since, well, it’s narrated by a wax doll. We’re never told why Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman living in 17th-century Denmark, has created this doll, but she sure does enjoy having it around. In fact, she and her friend insert various bits and pieces of fingernail, hair, etc. in the doll’s foot sometimes, which sounds…strange. Are they trying to practice some sort of witchcraft, though they aren’t actually witches? Or is this some sort of game? One of Christenze’s friends then takes the doll, and that friend’s daughter spends a lot of time with it, pretending to feed it and otherwise playing with it.

When a women in the household where the poor but noble Christenze lives accuses her of being a witch, the latter flees to a larger Danish city. She and the women she meets there, though, ultimately fall prey to the political establishment that, once it hears one whisper of witchcraft, start the proceedings to find out who has been practicing it. The entire narrative, though, is in the voice of the wax child, clearly more than just a doll. Its sing-song language, almost like an incantation, reflects the fact that Ravn drew upon letters, magical spells, manuals, court documents, and grimoires to come up with this story.

Split into two parts (Christenze’s life before she is accused and her life afterwards), The Wax Child can be read in one sitting, a dark, swirling, disconcerting narrative in which the women laugh at those who accuse them and yet practice rituals where it’s unclear if these are just suggestions for health and relationships based on lore or if they’re designed to be used as witchcraft. Ravn absolutely refuses to clarify, resulting in a story that draws us into an older world where these questions were likely never answered, either.