Young Witches and Nature in Recent Children's Visual Texts

This article considers the young witch figure in three recently published children’s visual texts: Phoebe Wahl’s picturebook Little Witch Hazel: A Year in the Forest (2021), Kat Leyh’s graphic novel Snapdragon (2020), and Wendy Xu’s graphic novel Tidesong (2021). Witches in children’s literature are often associated with the idea of liminality, but their liminality between nature and culture has received less scholarly attention. Delineating young witches and their interconnection with the natural world, the selected texts demonstrate the young witch figure’s relationships with different aspects of nature: the forest, the wild animals living in it, those living in urban areas, and those living in the sea. Reading the visual texts through Donna Haraway’s posthumanist theory and Lawrence Buell’s ecocritical framework, this paper argues that there is an emerging trend within children’s literature: stories about young witches now tend to depict how girls develop or strengthen their recognition of and respect for the subject status of wild animals and the environment.