India, June 13 -- The witch, historically, is a figure burdened with accusations and moral judgment. She has been scapegoated for calamities and reduced to a trope, the trope of a spectral effigy of patriarchal anxiety. Megha Rao's Our Bones in Your Throat conjures this spectrality and gives it form and fury within the confines of St Margaret's College. This campus, with its cryptic woods and architecture is where Esai and Scheherazade, friends-turned-rivals, recast the witch as metaphor.

Esai, the novel's protagonist, is the girl-next-door grappling with the extraordinary. When she finds out the haunting tale of Minaxi, a water spirit tethered to the college's forbidden lake, she stumbles into a historical continuum of betrayal and resi...