First of all, I’d like to make it clear that I admire both the author’s ambition and the lyrical prose she uses to convey it. That said, I can’t say I truly enjoyed this book.

To me, this novella was a considerable effort to get through (albeit partly due to formatting issues in the ARC, which are of course not the author’s fault). While it’s true that the book is written beautifully, with poetic language that clearly reflects the author’s background as a poet, it ultimately felt extremely cryptic and desperately impenetrable, leaving me cold and emotionally detached.

The context, as is often the case with stories about witches, is fascinating: 17th-century Denmark, seen through the eyes of a wax child, a magically created doll who witnesses the tribulations of a woman condemned for witchcraft. However, for me, the premise quickly fades as style is prioritised over substance. The language, though beautiful, became too abstract for my taste, and I struggled to follow the story.

For me (and I stress: for me!! because I truly believe this could be an outstanding read for the right reader), this ended up being a frustrating rather than enriching experience, mainly due to the lack of emotional connection I felt throughout.

While this was beautifully written, I found myself bored and disconnected with the story itself. The poetic writing gave no real detail of what was happening, and after finishing this book I couldn’t actually tell you what happened. Great writing but no real substance.

Remarkably well done, surpassed all expectations - or at least expectations any ordinary reader would hold or have when it comes to a more complicated and nuanced narrative playing with a historical context touching on witchcraft. I wouldn't simply and unfairly generalise and think of this one as a simple tale which promotes feminist ideas as blurbs may suggest. It's more than just witches, and it's extremely good to say the least.

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn is a haunting, poetic novella that lingers like a half-remembered dream. Blending surrealism, grief, and fragmented memory, Ravn crafts a story that feels both intimate and disorienting. The language is spare but evocative, and the narrative slips between reality and metaphor with unsettling ease, creating a deeply emotional undercurrent beneath its strangeness.

While the abstract style won’t be for everyone, readers willing to surrender to its ambiguity will find something quietly profound. It’s a meditation on motherhood, loss, and identity that asks more than it answers—and that’s exactly its power. A beautiful, eerie read that earns 4 stars for its originality and emotional resonance.

"And I, I am a wax child, secreted from the scaly glands of the honeybee's abdomen, of rose hip, propolis, pollen, dread, quince, longing, yeast dough, age, and ever young, with infinity's secret in my folds."

The Wax Child (2025) is Martin Aitken's translation of Voksbarnet (2023) by Olga Ravn, itself building on the theatre production Hex for which she wrote the script.

The novel is based on the real-life figure of Christenze Kruckow who was executed in 1621, having been twice accused of witchcraft, first in Nakkebølle in the late 16th century and later at Aalborg around 1620. As a nobelwoman, Kruckow's sentence was for decapitation by sword, but the other women involved in the two incidents - Olga Ravn records at least 8 in her afterword - were burned to death. Ravn, as she explains, condenses the events into a short period in the novel.

Kruckow and the other women were caught up more in inter-family rivalries and witchcraft hysteria created by the new King Christian IV of Denmark than anything else, although Ravn has Christenze engaging in practices that offend the local priest, the text including spells that Ravn has found from the archives dating from 1400 to 1900. Although the gathering together of independent women (Kruckow does not marry) causes as much consternation.

And the novel is rather less conventional than my description might imply, as it is navigated by the wax child, a figurine created by Christenze, which accompanies her and the women, but is also able to tell the story through its ability to perceive its wider surroundings and communicate with animals as well as other inanimate objects:

"Occasionally, a girl would come too and lift the lid of the chest to peep inside when no one was looking. Are you a real live child? she whispered then. But I could not answer, could not even blink, and the chest would then be closed again, and because I could see nothing but the lid, I decided to perceive my surroundings with my back, and with my back I heard and saw the Limfjord, the quaysides and the market place. I saw the mound with its gallows dripping with rain. I saw a servant girl drown her newborn in secret. I saw the sand of the execution place absorb the blood from the beheading. I saw a breastbone at the bottom of a tub of ale. I saw a goldsmith melt down stolen goods. I saw two children freeze to death on the street. I saw the ships come in with oranges, marzipan and blue raisins. I saw resentments old and new, saw pearls as on a string be spilled upon the cobbles."

This is a sensous and vivid text filled with spells, sounds, sights and scents.

Ravn worked with perfumier Lisbeth Jacobsen to create a scent for the book ("I’m interested in exploring how my own artistic practice can liberate itself from specific genres such as literature or visual art. For example, at the moment I’m developing a scent for my forthcoming book with perfumer Lisbeth Jacobsen, and we’ve spoken a lot about chalk, beeswax and apples") - the resulting perfume, made in solid wax, was a finalist for the Premio Aromata.

A sample of the text:

"The forest reached from Aalborg, northwards towards Ugilt, its fringes no more than scrub, a thickening denseness of lingonberry and juniper. The low-slung oakwoods ran east as far as to the sea, clambering across the moor and shaping shelters underneath its crowns, where a comb of horn was pushed up from the ground with an inscription concerning head lice; where apeared a jug, as round as a cabbage, pearls enough to fill a hand, of Roman glass, and further south-east not far from Gjerrild, in the dolmen there, numerous precious metals, small parts, coins and fragments of jewellery, silver and bronze. Jutland - the land itself a wax child, filled with horn and hair, with human remains, human tools, flutes and whistles carved in bone, and the wind became audible unto itself as it passed through them. In the dungeon Dorte whistled too. They took turns to sit by the door, where outside air might waft the face and be breathed, and Dorte whistled in reply to the howl of the wind. She thought about a marzipan mouth that had lain among others on a dish at the grocer's store, and smacked her lips to recall it, then turned to the others and said, I will get out of here, I have a plan, my son-in-law will come to my rescue, I cannot imagine otherwise."

A 2026 International Booker contender.

I just finished The Wax Child by Olga Ravn and wow, what a strange, haunting little book. I’ll be honest, at first I found the writing a bit hard to follow, but once I settled into the style, the story really started to come together. I could see it all playing out in my head like a dream (or maybe a nightmare). I loved the inclusion of spells and poems taken from real historical grimoires, it made the whole thing feel even more eerie and real. The historical aspect absolutely gripped me. It’s chilling to think that witch trials actually happened, in the same world we live in today. Wild, eerie, and fascinating all at once. Definitely one that lingers. 3.5 rounded up!

A brilliantly vivid and scattered book about misogyny and witch trials told through the eyes of a wax bound doll.

The doll sees all babies born dead, fleeing home, finding a new home, witch hunts and cruel punishments.

The narrative is intriguing and stilted in a way to force the reader to make inferences about the story. A clear testament to the authors skill as a storyteller.

Set in the seventeenth century, The Wax Child grew out of HEX, Olga Ravn’s play which premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in 2023. It’s narrated by the titular wax child moulded by an impoverished noblewoman charged with witchcraft.
Christenze lives in the household of her friend Anne. She helps with the birthing of Anne’s many children, none of whom survive more than a few days. Anne’s hope eventually turns to a bitterness which needs an outlet, conveniently provided by Christenze who flees before accusations are voiced, finding a home in Aalborg where Maren welcomes her into her circle of friends. When one of their husbands witnesses the women’s celebration of St Lucia’s eve, his suspicions lead him to the local King’s Lieutenant, little realising the horrors he’s about to unleash. Evidence is gathered and paid for, torture administered, confessions extracted, convictions declared and the cruellest of punishments handed down.
Ravn’s narrative is delivered in short episodic paragraphs interspersed with spells drawn from sources she used when researching this brief, powerful novella based upon the trials of Christenze Kruckow, her friends and many other women. With her proud independence and refusal to marry, Christenze is an easy target. The figure she’s moulded from beeswax, incorporating hair and nail parings, gives her motives an interesting ambivalence. Using it as a narrator is a risky device, but it works well, a testament to Ravn’s skill. In less able hands, her subject might have become sensationalist, but she does her readers the courtesy of allowing them to infer, and, as you might expect from a poet, her writing is arrestingly vivid. Kudos to Martin Aitken for his expert translation.

An arresting act of remembrance, Olga Ravn’s demanding novel builds on a lifelong fascination with witches; and developed out of a collaborative, theatrical work Hex. Ravn’s idiosyncratic piece highlights too her background as a poet. The setting’s Denmark in the early 1600s during the transition to a more austere Lutheran, Protestant society. A place in which the ‘old ways’ of the ‘cunning folk’ centred on folk magic and popular superstition are being systematically eradicated. A process concretised through the legislation and policies of Christian IV then king of Denmark and Norway. Seen from this perspective, the Danish witch hunts of the era were a particularly brutal method of modernisation through social and cultural cleansing. Although her central characters are actual women who were executed for the crime of witchcraft, Ravn jettisons the frameworks of standard historical fiction. Her story-telling is closer to a resurrection, a reclamation of lost traditions: systems of thought that represented particular ways of connecting to the world, to the very earth itself. In keeping with this approach, extracts from spells taken from grimoires and Nordic folklore - tracked down over five years of background research - are scattered throughout.

Ravn’s narrative draws on concepts of image magic, specifically the creation of waxen effigies sometimes known as voodoo dolls – or in England poppets. Her narrator is one of these figures, a child moulded from wax by Danish noblewoman Christenze Krukow. Krukow is now long dead but the wax child has endured, buried in the soil, somehow all-seeing, related to everything around it. The child’s mannered, near-archaic voice reflects its origins; its curious view of events its existence as part object, part organism. This hybrid status has enabled it to commune both with objects and with living things from birds to flowers and trees, its recreation of the past blends the archaeological with the organic. It’s a breathless, driven creature, sometimes restrained, sometimes feverishly spewing out words. All of which are intended to bear witness to Christenze’s fate.

Ravn’s sinuous sentences, her rhythmic prose sometimes border on abstraction, projecting a kind of mythic quality, as if stemming from sacred texts. Yet there are stretches of relative lucidity, in which the wax child recounts the known facts of Christenze’s everyday life. A life which tied her to a community of women in Aalborg, labouring women who wove, baked and sewed. Women who also performed ‘white magic’ rituals as a means of celebration and of control. The women explore their sexuality; they confront their dissatisfactions with their gendered roles. Issues particularly pertinent for Christenze who finds femininity constricting to the point of suffocation. She’s refused to marry, and loves only women. All of which makes her, and her companions, a threat to heteronormative conventions, notions of the centrality of church and the nuclear family.

Ravn’s hypnotic narrative’s grounded in Nordic history – she made extensive use of historical consultants. But she’s also intent on addressing various lacunae. Tellingly, there’s no archive of known witch burnings, details of the women involved are scant and scattered: though there are extensive lists of expenses from the carpenters employed to make the ladders to which women were tied before being dropped into bonfires to the wages paid to the men who fanned the flames. But the historical is intermingled with dense, intensely-lyrical passages featuring visceral images of nature. References to poems from writers like Gillian Clarke and Anne Carson underline Ravn’s interest in divisions being carved out between nature and culture. Admittedly that’s a tried-and-tested binary but Ravn makes effective use of it to comment not just on Christenze’s time but our own. In detailing Christenze’s experiences and the wax child’s entangled embodiment, Ravn goes beyond the history of the witch hunts, the role of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism, to mount a critique of the present. The scapegoating, the damaging cultural expectations that, albeit mutated, have persisted. She’s also clearly invested in highlighting how these divides, certain institutions and ideologies, have contributed to the ecological devastation that’s taken place in the centuries since the wax child was first sculpted. Translated by Martin Aitken.