Oh Mother!
Customer Rating: 
The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent is one of the best books I have read or reviewed in 2008. The book is featured in the 17th and 18th centuries and tells a fictionalized account of the Salem Witch Trials. I was fascinated and unable to put the book down until I was done. Narrated through the voice of Sarah Carrier, a precocious ten-year old, the historical component is compelling. Sarah's mother, Martha is a strong, sharp-tongued woman who takes care of her family with an iron will and an acid tongue. Sarah's family also includes her father, younger sister and brothers.
At the beginning of the novel, the Carrier move from Billerac to Andover, Massachusetts to live with their widowed grandmother. Unbeknownst to them, one of the children has smallpox and this illness will decimate their family and make them pariahs amongst the townspeople. But ultimately, though family members will die, this will be the least of their worries.
Strange events take place in Salem Village; young girls accuse villagers of witchcraft and unfortunately the finger points at Martha Carrier. It is easy to for them to choose Martha because she is such a rebellious, seemingly sacrilegious sort. Once Martha is arrested, Sarah has to prove her family love and loyalty in such a way that the story moves at breakneck speed from that point and the reader is spellbound by the story.
The Heretic's daughter is a wonderful look at a very sad time in our history and Ms. Kent does an amazing job of keeping us interested and drawn in. What a wonderful debut. I recommend this novel to all who enjoy an enthralling, well told story.
Angelia Menchan
APOOO BookClub
Courage
Customer Rating: When studying the various phenomena of the Salem Witch Trials, it is close to impossible for today's reader to imagine the terror and the suffering experienced by the accused, including those who were not found guilty. In The Heretic's Daughter, author Kathleen Kent has done a powerful,creditable job of approximating just that. The daughter of the title is arrested after her mother, Martha Carrier, one of the "witches" condemned to death and hanged. As she tells of her involvement, Sarah recounts the horrors of the summer and fall of 1692, and its slow but relentless progression from suspicion to execution, from incredulity to helplessness. Her narrative is a simple one, but so affecting that the reader is drawn into the insanity together with Sarah and her family, who were all but destroyed by the madness. The physical and emotional underpinnings of the mass delusion are seamlessly woven into the story, which seems as real as if it happened only a few years ago. The Heretic's Daughter is a stellar work of historical fiction, by far the best novelization of this topic that I've encountered.
"Life is not what you have or what you can keep. It is what you can bear to lose."
Customer Rating: 
Psychologically and emotionally vibrant, Sarah Carrier Chapman's fictional recollections of her family's involvement in the witchcraft trials of 1692 inspires readers to mourn the plight of the innocents who were hanged and empathize with their bereft families. At the same time readers also get a sense of some of the community pressures that spawned the accusations of witchcraft and the trials that led to the executions of nineteen women and one man. Seven more women died in prison awaiting trial.
Telling the story obliquely from her own perspective as a nine-year-old living in Andover, Sarah reveals the strained and seemingly cold relationships within her immediate family and, by contrast, the warm and emotional relationships within the family of her aunt, uncle, and cousins. Both families have secrets. When the witchcraft accusations spread from Salem Village to the surrounding towns, Sarah's mother is arrested for witchcraft, something we know from the outset of the novel. Her children, including Sarah and her three brothers, are seized and imprisoned in an attempt to force her mother to confess to crimes she did not commit--an effective form of blackmail, since conditions in the prisons are such that only the hardiest survive.
As Sarah tells her story, the beliefs of the Puritan community, a true theocracy, become clear. Witchcraft--the belief that people within their community are in league with Satan and contending with God for the souls of its residents--is the most serious sin possible, and as church leaders become more and more fearful that Satan is present and seeking new converts, the search for witches becomes more pressing. Smallpox epidemics, the killing and kidnapping of whites by Indians, the competition for scarce land as the population increases, inheritance laws, the unusually cold winter, and the scarcity of food also combine with fatal jealousies and petty resentments to create a psychological climate which makes the trials and executions possible. As the traumatic days until Martha Carrier's execution count down, author Kathleen Kent, a descendant of Martha Carrier, keeps the tension high. The sometimes gruesome details of everyday life provide a counterpoint to the overarching questions of justice and truth--what is "right" and what God "demands."
This debut novel, vividly imagined, carefully researched, and skillfully described, achieves some of the loftiest goals of fiction, allowing the reader to experience another time and place and to learn from them. The novel bogs down a bit in the details of Sarah's imprisonment, and it fails to explain adequately the motivations of the accusers and why the judges were so willing to believe them, but it is a terrific novel, filled with unforgettable details about the harshness of life, both physical and emotional, from three hundred years ago. n Mary Whipple
The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Inquiry into the Salem Witch Trials, classic study of why these trials were held
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
In Search of History - Salem Witch Trials (History Channel) (A&E DVD Archives)
The Crucible (Penguin Classics), text
Reviews Send to a Friend
