Witch Week

Diana Wynne Jones’s Witch Week is set at Larwood House, a boarding school for children whose parents were executed as witches. In this parallel world, magic is illegal and punished severely, so a note claiming that someone in class is a witch creates both panic and opportunity. Unpopular students Charles Morgan, Nan Pilgrim, Nirupam Singh, and Brian Wentworth discover abilities they cannot reliably control. Petty rivalries, bullying, and the school’s rigid hierarchy magnify each magical accident until the arrival of Chrestomanci becomes necessary.

Jones treats witchcraft as a social problem before making it a spectacle. The children fear exposure, yet the adults’ punitive system encourages accusation and concealment, allowing ordinary cruelty to borrow the force of law. Multiple viewpoints keep any single outsider from becoming the designated hero; each child misreads the others according to status and insecurity. Chrestomanci’s solution depends on understanding why this world diverged from neighboring realities, not on identifying one guilty pupil. Witch Week combines school comedy with a serious inquiry into scapegoating. Its magic reveals how institutions manufacture deviance when difference has no safe language or legitimate place.