The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent is a first novel, and a very good one. This is a novel of the Salem witchhunts - I wonder how many descendants of those accused at Salem have written novels about it; I would guess that few are this good.
The narrator, Sarah, is a small child when the witchcraft rumors begin. The first half of the book is written in time, as it happens; the second half is a recollection.
The book manages an odd balance of modern English usage with a strong sense of the past. I have begun Martha's practice of earmarking (not literally; this was a library copy) but will include only two. No, three, sorry.
I should note that most of the book is fairly matter-of-fact but in some passages the author writes with an almost hypnotic otherworldliness.
At one point Kent describes a hanging. The description is delicate, detailed, detached, and horrible - all at the same time.
The splintering rope tied around her neck. The gentle push into the summer currents...No rain like the shedding of tears, nor wind to punish the watchers in a tightening crescent of fearful expectation around the tree. The worn and cracked shoes, creased from years of treading the earth, now kicked free from struggling feet. The neck stretching, breaking; the gate to life closing and then collapsing.
In a paragraph, a connection, previously lacking, is built between two characters:
The only secrets I had ever kepts were girlish confidences with Margaret. But here was a different thing. My mother was demanding of me to keep a secret about a large leather-bound book of which I knew nothing. Her face was backlit by the growing flames from the hearth, and though her eyes were in shadow, I could feel her questioning gaze. It was the first time she had asked me for anything beyond the labor of my two hands. I nodded and whispered, "I promise."
She raised a forefinger to her chest, tapped it several times, and then pointed to me, the movement of her fingers forming the illusion of a thread connecting us, breastbone to breastbone.
This last, rather long passage is a description of a dream.
I am dreaming and in this dream I am in Aunt's root cellar...There is life above me and light. But the cellar door is closed and I have in my hand but one end of a candle that has burned through most of its wick.
...
My ears remain sharp to the surrounding darkness, and a rustling, like voices sighing, comes from every part of the cellar. It is not the skeltered scribbling ofa mouse or rat. It is softer, more faint. Somehow, more patient. It is the crackling of a beetle's wing, or the throbbing carapace of a locust on a shaft of wheat. Or the dry, whispering sound of root ends piercing through the earthen walls into the cellar. Slender, attenuated roots, some as fine as spider's wehs, groping their way to the center of the cave where I sit...It is the dream that will come again and again for many days...and always when I wake I will be in a cell in Salem prison. And it will be raining.
(That would be far too dramatic as the last paragraph in the book. It's fine, where it's placed.)
I think it is, in part, the contrast between the fantastic and the mundane that makes the whole story seem so
possible. The Salem story is known to all of us but somehow it never seems quite possible. Kent makes it very real.
There's also a very low-key subplot having to do with lives in England prior to emigration to the colonies. Just a very nicely done novel - especially for a first one.
Any awkwardness in the quotes is due to my trying not to give away any story lines.
