White is for Witching begins with three snippets from the three first-person narrators—Ore, 29 Barton Road, and Eliot—all describing what will happen to a character named Miranda at an unspecified point in the future. We learn through this opening that Miranda has gone missing, that the conditions surrounding her disappearance are vaguely supernatural, and that she suffers from an eating disorder called pica, which has her craving chalk. The novel then jumps back in time, to when twins Eliot and Miranda Silver are in Miranda’s room, talking about their mother Lily Silver, who has traveled to Haiti for photography work.
Lily has forgotten her watch at their home in Dover, England, and this worries Eliot, who fears that this sign of bad luck means that something terrible will happen to her. He pleads with his sister to stay awake and remember things about Lily, or else their mother will die. Eliot then falls asleep. Despite doing her best to stay up and remember, Miranda ends up falling asleep as well, and the next day the twins learn Lily has been fatally shot. 29 Barton Road, who is revealed to be the house the Silver family lives in, takes over the narration here, and chides Lily for journeying to Haiti after it warned her.
Some brief backstory on the Silver family and the house is given before the novel settles into the main time frame of the story. Lily Silver and Luc Dufresne, her husband, have moved with their two children from London to Lily’s grandmother’s home in Dover so that Luc can run it as a bed-and-breakfast. Lily was raised by her grandmother because her own mother abandoned her. This house is where Miranda discovers her taste for chalk, and the house reveals that pica is something that runs in her family—her great-grandmother, Anna Good, was the first to have suffered from the same condition. The house makes the first allusion to the idea of “witches,” describing a nameless woman who came before Anna, who ate her own limbs and drank her own blood, and was deemed a witch and considered mad.
A jump forward in time, and Miranda has just been discharged from a clinic she’d been sent to due to a breakdown she had six months prior, something she has trouble remembering. Her father and brother come to drive her home. While in the car, Eliot talks about how he is applying to Cambridge, and Miranda insists she apply too, despite the fact that both her father and her brother think that she shouldn’t attend college while she is still sick. Eliot hands her a newspaper, where she learns about the crisis affecting the Kosovan refugees in Dover. Three boys had already died from stabbings in the last three weeks, and this week marked a fourth being injured. Looking at the newspaper makes Miranda anxious for reasons she can not explain. When the car stops at a traffic light, a group of Kosovan girls catch a glimpse of Miranda in the backseat, which causes them to chase her until they eventually give up.
When the Silver family arrives home, they are greeted by the Turkish housekeeper, Ezma, and gardener, Azwer. They are married and have two daughters, Deme and Suryaz. The first morning Miranda’s back home, Deme goes missing. They eventually find her in the house’s lift, standing on tiptoe, staring at the Alarm button. She can not explain why she was in the lift, or why she did not press the button for help. A few days pass, and on the day of the twins’s Cambridge interviews Azwer announces that him and his family are leaving because they are afraid something bad will happen to them if they stay.
Before her interview, Miranda ends up colliding with a Nigerian girl named Ore, one of the narrators from the beginning, who is adopted. Ore is too afraid to go through with her interview, and so she tries to leave, yet Miranda stops her, offering her a prize if she stays. Both have their interviews, Miranda gives Ore back her purse as her prize, and then they part ways.
Before Azwer and his family leave, Miranda gives the daughters two gifts, a doll and a brush. In return they give her a letter warning her about how the house is bigger than it appears to be, and there are lots of people on these extra floors. This bothers Miranda, and so she retreats to the bomb shelter under the house. It is revealed that in 1942, during World War Two, Dover had been bombed, and many of the houses suffered severe damage. 29 Barton Road, however, remained pristine.
Miranda ends up being accepted to Cambridge while Eliot is refused. Eliot later settles on doing an internship with a television company in Cape Town, South Africa instead. Luc hires a new housekeeper, a Nigerian woman named Sade. The house frightens Sade, who understands that there is an evil presence within it, a presence she tries to ward off with her own forms of witching. While coming home from school one day, Miranda is attacked by the same group of Kosovan girls who chased her the day she left the clinic. Their leader, Tijana, accuses Miranda of being involved with the boys who have been stabbed. Miranda denies this, saying that she was in the clinic during the stabbings and thus could not have been seeing the boys. While the girls discuss this fact, Miranda manages to get away. Miranda later tells Eliot about this, and Eliot goes to talk to Tijana at school, who is with her cousin, Agim, the latest boy to have been stabbed. Agim first claims that it was Miranda he was seeing, but after being shown a photo of her he concedes that it wasn’t the same person. He says the girl resembled Miranda, but was named Anna. Agim ends up dying a few weeks later.
After learning of Agim’s death, Miranda has a series of surreal visions about her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother, who were all trapped by the house in different ways. They implore her to eat, but Miranda’s cravings have changed from chalk and plastic to something she can not quite identify. She fears that she is somehow responsible for the deaths of the Kosovan boys, yet she is not sure how or why. Eventually, it comes time for Eliot to leave for South Africa while Miranda heads for Cambridge.
Meanwhile, the house explains how Anna Good’s husband, Andrew Silver, died overseas during the war, and in her grief Anna ended up putting a curse on the house, imploring it to keep out everyone but the Silver women. The house does this gleefully, slowly driving the bed-and-breakfast guests insane and attempting several times to harm Sade, who refuses to leave despite the danger she is in.
At Cambridge, Ore and Miranda meet up again, and start to become romantically involved. Both have trouble sleeping, so they spend the nights together, walking around and telling each other stories. Ore tells her of the soucouyant, a woman who flies out of her body at night and eats the souls of children, and of the girl who kills her by lacing the empty body with pepper and salt. During their time together, Ore grows thinner and thinner, while Miranda feels the house calling her and is plagued by the feeling of being watched and followed. Her pica worsens until she begins craving human flesh, and struggles with fighting her desire to eat Ore. Their first term draws to close, and both Ore and Miranda head home. By this point, Miranda is so thin that she can barely see or walk, and once she’s home in her room she reveals to the house that she is in love. The house is horrified by this, due to the fact Ore is black, and decides to do whatever it can to break Miranda in order to keep her from seeing her.
Miranda’s visions of her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother worsen. She ends up calling Ore and asking her to visit her in Dover; Ore agrees, and yet her adopted cousins warn her about the dangerous refugee situation there, describing how the Kosovans have been stoned and mistreated. Once in Dover, Ore thinks about how people she sees do not look like the type to commit such heinous acts.
Miranda brings Ore home, and while Eliot takes an instant romantic liking to her, the house is instantly cruel, tempting her with the evil winter apples it grows in the yard, besieging her with whispers, and giving her visions of her skin rubbing off. Ore talks to Sade about the presence in the house, and Sade tells Ore to get out while she can and offers her some salt and pepper. One night, Miranda and Ore almost end up killing each other, as both mistake the other for the soucouyant. Miranda explains that she and the house are one, and that she can’t let Ore go. Ore resolves to leave, however, and buys a train ticket. Yet before she can escape the house, she notices a strange girl inside the lift, who turns out to be Miranda, pleading for Ore to stay so that she won’t get into trouble. Ore lashes out at her with the salt and pepper, and the two end up on a strange floor of the house, filled with blank eyed people. They move through them, Ore rubbing salt on their eyes so they can’t see her, and enter a small room with a sewing machine. Here is where Ore ends up cracking Miranda’s head, revealing the true Miranda underneath, the way she used to look before her eating disorder and the witching of the house. Ore tries to convince Miranda to discard the skin, but she refuses, instead attempting to sew herself back into it.
Sade arrives and rescues Ore, freeing her from the grip of the house with a net she had been knitting, and both Sade and Ore are able to leave for good, while Miranda remains within the grip of the house. The house then asks the reader whose story they believe out of the three narrators, saying to at least not trust Eliot, as he lied about being in South Africa and instead followed Miranda around Cambridge.
The novel draws to close with Miranda thinking about escaping, and how difficult it would be to slowly free herself from her family. Thus the novel circles back to the beginning, with Miranda fleeing to the bomb shelter and disappearing. White is for Witching ends with Eliot hearing what he thinks is Miranda moving in the attic above, long after she has vanished, but he can not be sure if it is real or something he imagined, and so he writes it down, as to not forget her.
