Review of 'Wild Moon Rising', by Jenny Knight, HarperCollins, June 2025 – A Review

Jenny Knight’s ‘Wild Moon Rising’ is a bewitching and powerful novel of one woman’s midlife transformation following divorce and loss. Themes of witchcraft, kinship, desire and growth collide in this waxing and waning journey in which Claire, main female protagonist, moves to a rental cottage to pursue a project as an illustrator and finds herself attending to her injured neighbour’s wild garden, instead.

Structurally, the novel closely mirrors an almanac. Chapters are titled after each calendar month’s full moon which lends the novel an organic agricultural feel and as the seasonal cycles in Tansy’s garden become Claire’s new work in progress, it also functions as a literary device which charts Claire’s personal growth and change as a woman who is re-building her own life from roots up.

Tansy, Claire’s older neighbour represents the village sage, the old hag, hedgerow witch. As she imparts botanical wisdom and knowledge to Claire, the strength of the two women united glistens:’F for foxgloves, a favourite – witches’ gloves, dead man’s bells; the plant to raise the dead or kill the living.’ Spell craft and the history of witches underpin this fiction which scrutinises how women have been devalued and punished for generations simply for having ‘knowledge menfolk did not like?’ and urges readers to meditate on damaging social stereotypes of women of a certain age: ‘What were they outside sex or servitude? A woman old and ugly with no use.’

Literary fiction has seen a resurgence in the theme of witches and spellcasting which serves as a means of resistance to patriarchal oppression as well as providing an illuminating intersection with feminist discourse, and exposes the history of witch hunting, in order to hold up to the light how the lives of marginalised women, particularly older women, were tortured for their very biology. Drawing on the powers of natural resources and the outdoors for the purposes of healing is one of Claire’s driving forces within the novel and Tansy’s garden, with all of her ‘crone’ knowledge of herbal lore and its symbolism imbues the narrative with a profound reclamation of power for women in all walks of life.

An acerbic wit and sense of comedy is well-timed in the dialogue of Claire and Tansy throughout, as well as in Claire’s interactions with her lovers; Knight has a natural ability to pull through ribbons of wit in the most sobering of scenes and this brings a delicate balance to both her characters, and the propulsion of the plot.

Desire pulses through the narrative with real severance. Desire does not depart, growing in potency through descriptions of intimacy that slow burns its readers with a startling, lyrical staccato:‘Every which way. Upside down, inside out. Hard. Soft. Fast. Eye still deep in eye. He licks the sewn slice of my Caesarean.’

The organic nature of desire is, too, felt in Tansy’s garden which is vivacious with life and movement like a younger version of Claire on a stucky dance floor: ‘a dizzying storm of butterflies on a buddleia: peacocks, small coppers, painted ladies, red admirals, white ones with black-tipped wings that brought to mind the Seventies Pierrot craze,…’

This is a bright mosaic of a debut novel which advocates for the healing power of the outdoors. It is rich in floral and plant symbolism and historical folklore, too, which drives a heartening narrative about both the potency of women, their friendships, witchery in midlife, and beyond.