A Witch’s Guide to Burning – Aminder Dhaliwal Showcases Her Innate Gift for Storytelling
Broken Frontier | Lindsay Pereira | June 4, 2024
Broken Frontier reviews A Witch’s Guide to Burning
There has always been a quiet confidence about Aminder Dhaliwal’s work, along with a sense of comfort that one is in the hands of a great storyteller. Consider her last book Cyclopedia Exotica about a community of cyclops living among us, which raised a lot of clever questions about society and discrimination without losing sight of an enjoyable narrative.
A Witch’s Guide to Burning is no different. It is a great story, wears its intelligence lightly, and manages to be both funny and poignant at the same time — a perfect choice for anyone who has loved Dhaliwal’s earlier work. One can tell that her preoccupations remain: voices of the marginalised, underdogs displaced by powerful forces and, as always, a woman’s place in the world. Carrying these queries on weakened shoulders is the protagonist ‘Singe’, a witch who has barely survived a burning.
This is an adventure story at heart, a quest for salvation that involves a series of trials, a lot of hairy situations, powerful spells, and a cast of unusual characters that weave in and out of Singe’s life as she tries to recover her lost magic as well as her understanding of who she is. We are told that she comes from a line of witches put to the stake by people who believe they have outlived their usefulness to society, which is an idea Dhaliwal has examined before, right from her first book. Singe must remember her name and find out what her magic is meant to do, while re-evaluating her role in society.
It’s interesting how Dhaliwal continues to share her work on Instagram, which is where this story first appeared, and where it was serialised for a few years before making its way to print. One supposes it must be like giving readers a peek at how her stories evolve, while gauging reactions to inform how she must continue them. It feels like a particularly smart move in this instance because of how some of the panels work as standalone set pieces. The humour comes from the camaraderie shared by Singe’s other protagonists, the witch-healer Yew-Veda and witch-turned-frog Bufo. As each chapter ends with a minor cliffhanger, it also allows Dhaliwal to experiment with playful interludes that sometimes list recipes for strange potions or explain how certain incantations work.
Read the rest of the review here!
A Witch’s Guide to Burning is no different. It is a great story, wears its intelligence lightly, and manages to be both funny and poignant at the same time — a perfect choice for anyone who has loved Dhaliwal’s earlier work. One can tell that her preoccupations remain: voices of the marginalised, underdogs displaced by powerful forces and, as always, a woman’s place in the world. Carrying these queries on weakened shoulders is the protagonist ‘Singe’, a witch who has barely survived a burning.
This is an adventure story at heart, a quest for salvation that involves a series of trials, a lot of hairy situations, powerful spells, and a cast of unusual characters that weave in and out of Singe’s life as she tries to recover her lost magic as well as her understanding of who she is. We are told that she comes from a line of witches put to the stake by people who believe they have outlived their usefulness to society, which is an idea Dhaliwal has examined before, right from her first book. Singe must remember her name and find out what her magic is meant to do, while re-evaluating her role in society.
It’s interesting how Dhaliwal continues to share her work on Instagram, which is where this story first appeared, and where it was serialised for a few years before making its way to print. One supposes it must be like giving readers a peek at how her stories evolve, while gauging reactions to inform how she must continue them. It feels like a particularly smart move in this instance because of how some of the panels work as standalone set pieces. The humour comes from the camaraderie shared by Singe’s other protagonists, the witch-healer Yew-Veda and witch-turned-frog Bufo. As each chapter ends with a minor cliffhanger, it also allows Dhaliwal to experiment with playful interludes that sometimes list recipes for strange potions or explain how certain incantations work.
Read the rest of the review here!