Filler #3: Daughters of Witching Hill (A Review)

Title: Daughters of Witching Hill

Author: Mary Sharratt

ISBN-10: 0-547-42229-6

ISBN-13: 978-0-547-42229-9

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Publishing Date: 7 April 2010

Prices:

Amazon.com: $13.52 (USD)

Amazon.co.uk: £10.99


Amazon.ca: $16.04 (CDND)

Would I Buy This Book: YES
I read.
I read alot.
At least I have been reading a lot lately.
I just read a fantastic book called The Daughters of the Witching Hill.
The book is about the Pendle Witch Trials.  It is told from the point of view from one of the accused, Elizabeth Southerns and Elizabeth's granddaughter fifteen year old daughter Alizon, whose later actions lead to her family being accused.
The books starts about thirty years before the trials.  Elizabeth is a poor, fifty year old widow, who does minor chores for her neighbours and begs to make her living, along with her daughter Eliza.  It details how Elizabeth became a cunning woman (a sort of healer) through her guide (and in the real trials her familiar) Tibb.  Tibb appears to Elizabeth in many forms.  As a young man, a hare and a brown dog.  He teaches her charms and "cures" that help the sick and disabled of her community.
Her daughter Eliza notices her mother's new talents and demands that she teach her how to help people so that she can gain respect in the community too.  She gains the guide Ball, but Eliza abandons her "studies" when she meets her husband and has children.
We also meet Anne Whittle (also known in the community as Chattox) and outside Elizabeth's new talents things go relatively well for her and her family.
Elizabeth's story goes up to Alizon's birth.
When Alizon takes over the story, she describes life before her father died and after.  Alizon loved her father more than anything and after he died it seems like the family's spirit died along with him.  Her mother is inconsolable and becomes pregnant with a baby who was concieved illegitimatly.  It is this baby that will be the down fall of the entire family.

I have to say I loved this book.  It was very well written and I thought it was clever of the author to start the story several years before the trial themselves.
She made the characters believable and it made you want to get to know these people more.  For me, they went from being a two dementional people who you kind of felt sorry for, to being real people who had hopes and dreams for the future.  They were poor but they still tried to help those who were even more poor than they were.

The social system was well defined, and you got the feeling of a real community and how life was in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century.  It was all just very well done and if I can capture half of what she did as far as the social norms for the period go, as well as create such well rounded characters, it'd be so happy.

Anyway, I really would suggest this book to anyone who is interested in historical fiction.