Product Description

"This is a powerful, absorbing and unusual novel" - "The Bookseller". "The sort of historial novel eleven and twelve year olds will gobble up at a sitting" - Nina Bawden. When Mary sees her grandmother accused of witchcraft and hung for the crime, she is silently hurried to safety by an unknown woman. The woman gives her tools to keep the record of her days - paper and ink. Mary is taken to a boat in Plymouth and from there sails to the New World where she hopes to make a new life among the pilgrims. But old superstitions die hard and soon Mary finds that she, like her grandmother, is the victim of ignorance and stupidity and once more she finds herself having to make important choices to ensure her survival. With a vividly evoked environment and characters skilfully and patiently drawn this is a powerful literary achievement by Celia Rees, that is utterly engrossing from start to finish.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8776 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Age 10 and over

She was locked in the keep for more than a week. First they walked her up and down, up and down between them, for a day and a night until she could no longer hobble, her feet all bloody and swollen. She would not confess. So they set about to prove she was a witch...

Mary's grandmother is executed for witchcraft, and Mary is forced to leave her home to avoid the same fate. At first she flees to the English countryside, but when the atmosphere of superstition and suspicion becomes all consuming she leaves on a boat for America in the hope that she can start over and forget her past. But during the journey, she realises that the past is not so easy to escape.

Witch Child is a complex, absorbing novel, told in the form of pages from a journal found loosely sewn into an old quilt many years later. From the moment the story begins, the tension is tangible, and the reader is drawn into a world of mistrust and uncertainty that shakes to the core. All this is cleverly conveyed through the eyes of Mary, whose first sense of wide-eyed wonder gradually develops a mature understanding of her situation, drawing the reader in to a dark and dangerous world where the tiniest slip could mean death.

Celia Rees, always a fine writer, tackles her subject with serious and sensitive aplomb, bringing together a sense of history with an extraordinarily powerful and thrilling story that is unforgettable.--Susan Harrison

Review
Mary is a witch. The year is 1659 and her grandmother has been hanged. A mysterious stranger helps Mary escape from England on a ship full of emigrants to the New World. With her guardian, Martha, a 'healer', she arrives at Salem, Massachusetts - a theocracy itself to become famous for witch trials at the end of the century. The group moves on to another settlement, Beulah, where the work is hard and rules are strict. Mary meets Jaybird, a Native American, but she makes few other friends and becomes increasingly isolated from a community ill at ease with itself. Written in the form of a diary, this novel offers insight into the dubious position of the 'wise woman' in history. Sought after for her knowledge of herbs to cure the sick, she is nevertheless reviled for causing disease or for failing to effect a cure. Matters come to a head when Mary becomes the scapegoat for the other local girls, whose sickness is declared the result of witchcraft. Martha discovers Mary's diary and advises her to destroy it. Instead Mary hides her diary, page by page, sewn into the patchwork quilt she and Martha are making. Then as the hue and cry goes up for her arrest Mary quietly disappears into the woods. The diary form of this novel make it compelling reading and the first third of the book gives a vivid account of life on board ship, in cramped and squalid conditions below decks where even the air seems rationed. Here, too, Mary's past haunts her as the sailors, ever sensitive to the supernatural, feel the presence of spirits. This absorbing and well-written novel will be appreciated by 11-year-olds upwards. (Kirkus UK)

After watching her grandmother hang for being a witch, Mary journeys to the New World only to discover that human nature's desire to blame another is not limited to 17th-century England. Unlike most stories about people accused of sorcery, Mary freely admits to her gift, one that offers pain with its limited power. Mary's intelligence and openness to the world around her, along with a distinct distrust of the omnipresent religious fervor provide the narrator with immense appeal. There's objectivity to the diary entries about her journey to Massachusetts among a group of Pilgrims and her hard work of settling in a new land. She freely enjoys the company of a young sailor, gets to know the native guides, and appreciates the healing powers of plants. Equally, she recognizes the frivolity and conceit of others in the party and the arrogance and selfishness of the leader who claims to speak for God. When trouble arises, whether in England or in the colonies, some are quick to blame the Devil and his spawn, the witch. Luckily, Mary finds some good people who cling to logic even amid their religious allegiance or who lack that mindset of blind devotion. This diary is eerily given fake credibility by a single-page prologue and an afterword that describe the provenance of the pages and call for further information from readers, an unnecessary gimmick. The tightrope that Mary walks as an outsider in her society is a dangerous one, and the suspense tightens as events unfold. The text is haunting despite a lack of antiquity in the language. Perhaps wisely, Rees forgoes emphasizing historical or theological accuracy and instead focuses on providing immediate characters. With its theme of religious intolerance and its touches of the supernatural, this is sure to be in high demand for a long time. "(Fiction. 11-14)" (Kirkus Reviews)

Observer
'An exciting well-told tale'

Customer Reviews

Captivating well-written story of a young witch in the seventeenth century
Celia Rees writes beautifully here, literally grabbing you from the first page and dragging you into Mary's story from 1659.

Mary is a young girl growing into womanhood fearful of persecution. The story opens immediately with the witch trial of the woman she calls "grandmother" who has brought her up from when she was a baby. To avoid the same fate, Mary finds herself being shipped off to America, in disguise with a group of migrating Puritans. However, even in America, Mary finds it hard to disguise some of her peculiarities however hard she tries, and the strongly Puritan community she lives amongst needs to find a scapegoat...

It's a great fictionalised introduction to the persecution of women in the witch-hunt trials of the seventeenth century. Written as a journal fragment from Mary's own account of her travels, it's really easy to engage with the story and I didn't want the book to end when it did. Mary's story breaks off to leave us guessing about her ultimate fate.

It's a great story and I can recommend it for ages 11+

easy read
This is aimed at teenagers so it's perhaps unfair of adult readers to rate it, but I did feel that it starts up so many potential threads which it just doesn't follow through so ultimately I found this an unsatisfactory read.

The characters are quite stereotypical and lack any depth - we never really understand why the puritan reverend is the way he is: genuine religious obsession, power, repressed sexuality? Also the switch from bitchy teenage girls to 'witches' doesn't really ring true...

Mary herself, the first person narrator, is guite an unclear character: she describes herself as a witch in line two of the book, but what does that mean, and what does it mean to her? None of this is ever made clear which leaves the narrative quite unstable.

Having said all that, this is probably an interesting read for younger girls, and the historical setting (late 16th century) might be one that teenagers know little about. I read this in a couple of hours but hated the ending that just hangs there waiting for the reader to buy the sequal. So, overall, not a bad book but an unsatisfying one.

witch child
i had to read ths book for year 9 andi thought it was fantastic- because it was based on true tale you can imagine every single thing. ou can get drawn into the book righ from the start and it never bores you.