Friday, May 14, 2010

Book Review - Witch Child by Celia Rees

Rating: 8/10

Witch Child
is a novel by Celia Rees about the diary of Mary Newbury, a fourteen year old girl living during the English and Salem witch hunts. Her words are chronicled in a journal-like way but the dates are not certain so the posts are sequenced from clues in the text. It is about her voyage from England to the New World, thinking that she had left the witch identity behind (her grandmother was accused of being one).

Well, the book interested me because of this stuff:

"The following manuscript comes from a remarkable collection of documents termed 'the Mary papers.' Found hidden inside a newly discovered and extremely rare quilt from the colonial period, the papers seem to take the form of an irregularly kept journal or diary. All dates are guesswork, based on references within the text. The first entries are tentatively dated from March 1659. I have altered the original as little as possible, but punctuation, paragraphing, and spelling have been standardized for the modern reader.

"Alison Ellman
"Boston, MA"

I know. It must be pretty crazy but, like I said in the previous posts, I like reading historical novels and this sounds a lot like one (but is isn't, by the way). Anyway, there's an [American] Indian boy, named Jaybird, here who has long lashes. It seems that he's pretty close to Mary and, based on the preview, it seems that she joined the Indians for a time. Oh well.

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