The Witch Case

“The Case of Babaroga” is an imaginative story about good, bad and the power of love. Written as a modern fairy tale, it tells the story of a young boy who has a showdown with old witch Babaroga, using the internet as his weapon. The story follows twists and turns and in the end Babaroga, realizing that her evil comes from the fact that no one has taught her to love, is not defeated but transformed. Babaroga is a protagonist from the childhood of all those who consider themselves adults today, since we have learned to play the part, but when the surface is scratched a little, we turn out to be just big children. New protagonists have now appeared to scare today’s children and so Babaroga the old witch must retire. But she is not the least naive and has left her successor, the computer virus, to frighten today’s children.

The author did not want to physically destroy Babaroga, so she and the pro-tagonist Veliki Miki (Big Mickey) reeducated her. This was very difficult since her upbringing had been neglected. Veliki Miki discovered that Babaroga had once been the good fairy Dobrila, but she had forgotten how to love. He had to frighten her with something that was even more menacing than she was: Plastic that threatened to devour the whole world, When Babaroga learned to love once again, she lost the characteristics that made her a witch and turned back into a good fairy.

Modern Serbian children’s literature has become a field for various experiments, One of those introducing innovations is Olivera Jelkic, author of several noted books. The novel “The Case of Babaroga” strives to tell the tale of settling accounts with one of the greatest enemies in children’s world in the form of a detective story. With Veliki Miki as the protagonist again (first seen in “The Case of Brrrk”) as he distances himself from typical taboos such as Babaroga, Olivera J elkic joins together several important elements: external reality with a fantasy story, and the fairy tale as one of the basic forms of popular literature with the detective story and the internet, as in “The Case of Brrrk”.