Witch Child

By: Celia Rees

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Hardcover | 1 October 2000 | Edition Number 1

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Witch Child is both astounding and brilliant. It is written in the form of a journal, kept by a fourteen-year-old girl in the 1650s and hidden for centuries in a quilt, until finally falling loose when the quilt is being cleaned.
Mary sees her grandmother, the woman who brought her up, executed as a witch and she knows that the healing skills and abilities that saw her grandmother condemned may well be her own undoing. So Mary runs away and joins a group of pilgrims travelling to the New World. When she eventually arrives in Massachusetts, Mary discovers that old superstitions die hard and soon she, like her grandmother, is the victim of ignorance and stupidity, and once more finds herself having to make important choices to ensure her survival.
With a vividly evoked setting and characters skilfully and patiently drawn, this is a powerful literary achievement that is utterly engrossing from start to finish.

Industry Reviews

'I am Mary. I am a witch' is the frank beginning to a remarkable diary, the pages of which are found hidden within a New England colonial quilt. Its entries, beginning in March 1659, detail the survival of the writer and the craft she practised. Witness to the trial by floating and brutal hanging of her grandmother, Mary escapes among a party of Puritans setting sail for the New World. She must hide her knowledge and pretend complete obedience to their faith or face deadly exposure. Her beliefs are the survival of the old religion before Christ, spirituality rooted in nature and firmly grounded in herbalism. As the settlers head deep into the forest to found a new Jerusalem under their madly prophetic leadership, she finds friends and a sympathy in her beliefs amongst the Indians. However, as the isolation of winter fosters paranoia, Mary becomes a focus for dangerous suspiscions. This re-appraisal of the witch as a positive character rather than demon or innocent victim is refreshing in this spellbinding historical novel, as is the impressive evocation of puritan pioneer life. (Kirkus UK)

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