Novel of the week Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27)

“Witch hunts have made a comeback in recent years,” said Sarah Hagi in The New York Times. At least the term has, which makes this a good moment for Rivka Galchen’s “very funny” novel about a 17th-century German woman accused of witchcraft at a time when execution was a common sentence. Katharina Kepler’s primary offense is her independence, and as the widowed mother of three shares her version of events while various townspeople make accusations against her, Galchen expertly weaves together their perspectives, “showing how easy it is for a mob mentality to take hold.” Alert readers will notice that one of Katharina’s adult children is the astronomer Johannes Kepler. But the focus stays on Katharina, who is “sharp and bright” on the page, said Carolyn Kellogg in the Los Angeles Times. Galchen, acclaimed for Atmospheric Disturbances, has written another smart novel that highlights the tension between science and superstition, “all while being funny and deceptively easy to read.”