Riana Scheepers is a South African writer who grew up bilingual in Afrikaans and Zulu, and writes in the former. At the time she published this story collection she was still a high-school teacher, and she has written extensively for children as well as for adults. She doesn't seem to approve of her work being translated into English, but does seem to be quite well known in the Netherlands and Flanders.

The stories in this collection play on some obvious South African themes: Zulu and Dutch-Calvinist cultural traditions, violence, and so on, but the main recurring theme seems to be the way female strength can be elided into witchcraft. In some of the stories women are falsely accused of using supernatural powers; in others they actually do seem to have the power to change the world in unauthorised ways. Sometimes — as in the story where an elderly woman unjustly consigned to an asylum by her relatives gets her own back on the world by fine embroidery — Scheepers expresses her anger at the state the world is in subtly and very indirectly; at other times she is frighteningly direct. ( )