I absolutely love this book. I listened to "Shrill" as an audio book after bingeing the TV show in a weekend and loving it. When I read "The Witches Are Coming", I totally hear Lindy West's voice in my head. You can tell that she writes exactly how she thinks and speaks and it is so fun to read. This book is so important and topical right now. It is full of smart and sassy commentary and parts of it are laugh out loud hilarious. I will highly recommend this book to my friends and family. I can't wait until this comes out so I can tell everyone to read it. I'm thinking I'll need to give it a second "read" once the audio book is released.

Reading this in August, which has probably been one of the craziest months of the 2016 presidency in recent memory, it’s hard not to burst into hysterical, crazed, bitter laughter as you read through this. It’s a combination of a hard clear look at how we got here and an extrapolation of the idea of the “witch hunt” that some people believe they’re facing and why people are so fucking angry. It’s also a good look back at some of the stuff from our teenagerhoods (Adam Sandler, South Park most notably), and our current culture (fucking GOOP). It’s not all fire and blood though - she does end with some anecdotes about her stepdaughters and hope for the future. (And I should not need to say oh it’s not all angry feminist writing but lol irony.) Definitely pick this up when it comes out.

This was an interesting set of essays from Lindy West; however, I enjoyed Shrill more. It was nice, shorter read.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I’ve enjoyed Lindy West’s writing since I used to read Jezebel regularly and I liked Shrill.

This book of essays was pretty good, and had some funny parts. Some of the essays seemed repetitive and I don’t feel like I really heard anything new. The essay on the Adam Sandler movies cracked me up.

This was a quick and entertaining read and I look forward to anything else Lindy West writes.

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE! Lindy West is an incredible writer, and I loved The Witches Are Coming. Essays on our current cultural climate, it's a feminist book that should be read by EVERYBODY.

I loved Shrill, so when I saw this was coming, I knew I had to read it. I love Lindy’s voice, her humor makes some of these upsetting topics easier to read about, and she’s accessible, nothing overly complicated or hard to follow. Reading this got me more excited to watch her show, and I’d definitely pick up anything by her in the future.

Just as terrifying, brilliant, hilarious, and motivating as I expected. I will be covering it for Book Riot in the coming weeks.

The Witches Are Coming is a collection of new and old works by Lindy West. Each chapter is organized around a central concept such as Joan Crawford and West’s view of her as a female entertainer in male-dominated Hollywood. The chapters range in terms of quality and logic. It is not necessary to read West’s previous writings to understand this collection.

While not flawless, TWAC should appeal to its target audience of the older Milennial liberal feminist. West includes many anecdotes and approaches all of her topics from a personal level rather than professional or scientific. This works with her informal style but means the material should be taken with a grain of salt. TWAC is a collection of thoughts, not an instructional guide.

The book is unfortunately lopsided; some sections flow incredibly well and are filled with passion while others feel emotionally detached.

Die-hard fans of West will notice that she has directly copy/pasted previously published works into this book, such as her Jezebel article on the Goop cookbook. It is not indicated in TWAC when these unquoted quotations are inserted (at least in the ARC).

Overall, I would recommend The Witches Are Coming for casual fans of West’s previous work or for those who want a call to arms regarding changing the current course of politics in the United States.

I love Lindy West. I'm just going to throw that out there. She is intelligent, funny, thoughtful, and no-holds barred in a way that I had always (in the early 90s) secretly hoped Roseanne Barr would be - but she's not, as we all learned and then re-learned ad nauseum (thanks, Roseanne for your groundbreaking television show, but I really wish you'd reconsider your batshit political leanings, at least). But I digress (shocker, I know).

*ahem*

Starting over. I love Lindy West. I loved Shrill, I've loved her published essays/articles, and this book is no exception. I love it too. I love a good, positive women/witches comparison.

This book has it all. It's pithy, brutal, frank, and hopeful at turns. Is Lindy angry? Undoubtedly. But you know what? So am I. And so too, should you be. The world is falling apart around us. Women are losing their rights and their autonomy left and right. So are trans folks. And POC. Who's next? And why do we keep letting it happen?

West covers feminism, abortion, climate change, misogyny, Goop, whether or not Adam Sandler is really funny, Joan Rivers, Ricky Gervais, Adam Carolla, Harvey Weinstein, the aforementioned Roseanne Barr, Gamergate, Pizzagate, toxic masculinity, gendered violence, and pretty much every other interesting (and incendiary) topic a modern human might care to explore.



My determination: 5 out of 5 arbitrary items of rating. Buy this book. And Shrill. Bask in the warm, fiery glow of Lindy gleefully lambasting the worst of the worst, and utterly refusing to apologize for it. As she should.

Lindy West continues to blow me away with her nuanced and insightful look at the world we currently live in. I couldn't recommend this novel enough. Thank you, Lindy!

People who already have these opinions will enjoy this. People who should read this are dicks and wouldn't even dream of it. Part of why they are dicks.

It was humorous. I read each section over a period of time when I just needed something short/a time killer. I read 2 sections in a row and it was a bit too much for me - it went from amusing me to annoying me. Definitely a "in small doses" kinda of read that is good to have on your phone in case of insomnia, trains, or waiting for food.

Lindy West is one of the sharpest, funniest writers out there. The Witches are Coming deals with many heavy topics, but it is well worth reading because of the insights and excellent wordplay that Lindy West skillfully uses. I would recommend reading these excellent essays in small settings because of the heavy nature of many of the topics. In reading The Witches are Coming, I felt affirmed in continually being upset with how the world is and not feeling ashamed for speaking my mind. I feel like I have been conditioned to stay quiet so I can be liked, but the truth is, as I get older, I care much more about not being complacent in the state of the world and don't care as much if people don't like me. My favorite essay was about GOOP and the weird brand of wellness it promotes, but I thought all of these essays were great.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!

"If there is magic in Trump's ability to conjure reality out of hot air and spittle, there is an equally powerful magic in the opposite: in speaking the truth, unvarnished, about what we see, what we remember, what has been done to us by people who have assumed power and status as a birthright, rules written just for them. People who are nervous or just trying to wait this moment out until everything settles down. There is power in saying, no, we will not settle down. We will not go back. It's the lifting of a veil, the opposite of a glamour. So fine, if you insist. This is a witch hunt. We're witches, and we're hunting you."


This book is what I needed to read. It's what we all need to read in the year of our lord 2019. Pick this up as soon as it is released and let the reality of our future as Americans wash over you. Get really angry. And then go tell everyone about it.

This book is well-written and enjoyable, with laugh out loud moments, but I feel like the people who need to read it, won't. There are some really great quotes in this book, but overall, I felt like it lacked substance. The themes of the essays didn't feel cohesive to me.

Let’s be real: the people reading this essay collection are not going to be learning anything new. The Witches Are Coming seems targeted to an audience that already lives and breathes the emotional trauma of being anything but a white cisgender straight male daily. I didn’t go into this expecting new information; I was hoping for more of a “yeah, we’re gonna light the pyres but it’ll be bras we burn at the stake!” vibe.* Like a roaring, inspiring, unapologetic call to action to rise up together against the current state of our white conservative male dominated society. Like a handbook for fighting back!

Which it sort of attempts, I guess, to be fair. It was too bogged down by bad jokes and weak references to make much of anything stick. Except for the chapter rating bad Adam Sandler movies: I remember that well, because it’s a timely and important and relevant criticism to make about what we are facing in these troubled times!

The “witches” theme was so embarrassingly shoehorned into the essays that it should’ve been dropped all together. West pulled this dated high school English class move where you close the chapter by referencing a joke or comment from somewhere else in the essay and it just made me cringe every time. The writing was so all over the place that no one chapter could just about a single issue, and that completely destroyed the flow of her arguments.

I didn’t laugh out loud (it’s the year 2019 and I’ve lost the ability to enjoy anything) but I do enjoy West’s Internet-style humor, generally. Here, the jokes were rambling and often needed editing, and there was a standout homophobic joke in the beginning that legit shocked me because she spends a lot of time criticizing that sort of behavior. This truly felt like a first draft of the book, before it landed in any editor’s inbox, because stuff like that should’ve been caught.

And for what it’s worth, my big complaint about her debut Shrill was that West talks about her husband a lot. She carries that through Witches, too, which is disappointing because I don’t read feminist books for cute anecdotes of the author’s male partner.

*I need a new bra very badly and I’m mad about it. That’s it, that’s my joke.

"Of course the kids of Trump supporters think that Priuses - which, by the way, are still mass transit-killing, fossil fuel-burning luxury items manufactured by the automotive industry, so, yes, extremely granola - are effeminate and embarrassing, virtue signaling for cucks, because waste is manly and destruction is manly and real manly men drive trucks guns bang bang toot toot truck deer beer mud truck vroom black smoke logging antlers tits fire and blood."

3.5 stars rounding up. Lindy is just so kick-a$$, I wanted to like this book more than I actually did. Her ideas are spot on and in alignment with my personal beliefs, her stories are engaging, and she's a great story teller. Plus - bonus for me! - she's my age and lives in my city so part of me thinks we'd be besties if we met in real life. My beef with this book might be more of a beef with myself - almost every chapter is comprised of a political/environmental/sexist/fat-shaming rant with some storytelling thrown in, and it made for a draining read. If I was a better person, I would have felt inspired after I finished it, but instead I just felt like I wanted to hug a puppy to make myself feel a little better.

Some of the chapters are straight up sad-face making and anger inducing from the beginning to the end. Ted Bundy Was Not Charming - Are You High? is about, well, you can probably guess: how Ted Bundy was this creepy weirdo who (literally) got away with murder (for a while, anyway) just because he's a white dude. Anger is a Weapon is about the negative connotation of feminism. But some chapters, they tricked me. Do, Make, Be, Barf started out as a humorous tale about Gweneth Paltrow and Lindy's experience going to a Goop conference... but it melded into a statement on the unrealistic beauty expectations of women. Magic Isn't Magic was heartbreaking for me to read because it started out with Lindy patting herself on the back for writing a memoir (Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman) that got turned into a Hulu television show. Wait - that's not the heartbreaking part! That's the awesome part! "Not to brag..." the chapter starts out. Lindy, you go right ahead and brag - you deserve to! The heartbreaking part is how it ends, which I won't reveal here because of spoilers.

Long Live the Port Charles Whooping Cranes was my favorite, because it ended with this glimmer of hope. In it, Lindy talks about how her step daughter was involved in creating a mural that celebrates the Black Panther Party. "I asked her if they had treated the paint somehow to make it easier to remove graffiti. "No one would tag this mural," she said. At the time of this writing, no one has." The chapter closes with her step daughter taking the mic at the dedication ceremony to announce she'll keep fighting for justice by whatever means necessary. Hey, world, there's hope in our youth!

Lindy brought her sense of humor, wit, sass, and smarts to The Witches Are Coming. And I get it, I do - we live in a effed up time and there's a lot to be sad and angry about right now. I just wish Lindy had brought a liiiiiitle bit more unicorns and rainbows to the party too.

This book of essays by Lindy West is exactly what I wanted to read right now. She calls our attention to the dangerous tropes we are living with today and how to fight for the better world that we want. Her look at internet trolls and the pervasiveness of white supremacy is particularly enlightening. My one criticism is that this book is very of this moment and I'm not sure how well it will hold up in the future. However, it was a really satisfying and empowering read.

Raw and confessional and irreverently funny, The Witches Are Coming is a tour de force that takes everything happening in our current cultural climate and holds it up to the light. As with any collection of essays there are stronger and weaker topics, but Lindy West manages to show how everything is connected in unexpected ways (such as her essay about microphones and how it ties into toxic masculinity). This book felt like sitting on your best friend's back porch on a summer night, drinking and talking about anything and everything - which is a real credit to West and her style of writing.

A special thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a free advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

I loved parts of this book a whole lot; I agree with so many of the overarching themes, it's funny as all get out, and I thought there were a lot of beautifully stated nuggets of wisdom. But I also felt like some of the in between moments were choppy and meandering, and some of it felt like a bit of a retread. It felt like it was preaching to the choir. I'm conflicted, because I expected to unreservedly love this

Hell yeah, Lindy West. This collection of essays is incredible and full of fire—just like the rest of us in this world.