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: #139738 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-04
• 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
`As psychologically acute account of moral panic as you could hope to read and a fine weapon with which to arm any child in the battle against all its modern forms'
--Guardian

Observer
'An exciting well-told tale'

Customer Reviews

A brief outline of this fanastic book
I recieved Witch Child as a 15th Birthday present and was a bit anxious about the content. My sister had heard of it and meant to buy it so I reluctantly read the first couple of pages and was immediatly addicted to it. I found the struggle of the young witches life abosorbing and deep. I felt as though I really knew Mary and i felt as though I was in the story watching over her. I pictured the environment Mary described so well. I think that Celia Rees has captured an amazing tail of voyage and discovery. I found it interesting the way Rees has described the medicines and such and I compare it to the modern world. I would recommend this to anyone betwee the ages of 13-19 years old. I feel it is a real eye-opener as to how early civilians set up living in America.

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+

Enthralling and totally absorbing
I loved this book. It would appeal to anyone who had even the slightest interest in witch craft. It is a diary account of Mary, daughter of a witch who sets out for a new life when her grandmother is hung for being a witch. It is written very cleverly to make you think that it is a true story, unfortunately it is fiction. The novel is excellent and i would recommend it to anyone...its great...