Kathleen Kent

As God in heaven knows, changing a name cannot change the history of a place.

Nothing can change the history of Salem, Massachusetts, so the inhabitants have embraced it. They have built a memorial to the innocents who died there, they have made a kind of tourist industry of it, but the reality of what transpired stills the heart when truly contemplated.

...on that exact hour, a four-year-old girl, Dorcas Good, was examined by those judges in Salem Town jail. Her little feet and hands were show more bound by iron manacles so she could not send her spirit out and torment further the girls who were her accusers.

The reality of what happened to 20 innocent men and women in Salem, and to countless others who were not hanged, reads like a twisted fairytale; but of course, it is all too real and all too revealing of who we humans can be in our worst hours. Look around, closely, and see the blame game and hysteria of our own times.

Most of us are familiar with the events, and perhaps even with the details, but Kathleen Kent has put such a human face on Martha Carrier and her family that it all seems imbued with a fresh kind of horror and terror. What could you do in the face of such accusations? How long could you stand up for your innocence or that of your loved ones when sanity has taken a vacation and your mere denial places others in jeopardy? Who hasn’t uttered words that might be twisted and reshaped until they are swords in the hands of the unscrupulous fanatic?

Kent writes beautifully, with a sharpness and wisdom in her words:

A red wasp crawled across my hand and I froze lest he bury his stinger in my flesh. He was beautiful and frightful with his soulless black eyes and quivering barb and it came harshly to me that this garden was the world and from the world there would be no hiding.

The book is sprinkled with words I wished to remember and quotes I stopped to ponder:

Life is not what you have or what you can keep. It is what you can bear to lose.

Men are always the last to ken what women know by sniffing the air. That’s why God gave bodily might to Adam, to balance the inequities in strength.

The tension in this novel begins to build from the first page. The sense of foreboding is palpable. Sarah, our narrator, says The dread that had poured over me on the way to Samuel Preston’s farm returned to lick its way from my eyes to my neck. It congealed and tightened there like an insect caught in an amber necklace. That pretty much describes the way I felt throughout the book.

We know where it is going, we know it will not end well, we know reason did not win this battle, and yet I sat on the edge of my seat, hoping and wishing for another outcome. But, this is not a book about fantasy, this is a book about reality--in 1692 this was a world and an event that was all too real. Like [b:The Crucible|17250|The Crucible|Arthur Miller|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547467608l/17250._SX50_.jpg|1426723] before it, it is about strength; strength of character, impossible endurance, maintaining who you are in the face of unspeakable injustice. It is a reminder that there are different ways to define victory, some victories are shallow and some are intangible and worth remembering for ages.

If I am ever able to make the trip to Massachusetts, I would like to stand before the memorial they have built there and say a prayer for the souls of the twenty, and for all the other lives that were touched and changed by what happened to them there. For now, I pray for us, that we will have more wisdom, judgment and compassion than our ancestors had. show less

I picked the Heretic’s Daughter off my shelf thinking I could just blow through it, that it would be just “okay” and I could give it away. I was pleasantly surprised when I blew through it, not because it was mediocre, but because it was very interesting. I like that it is a framed narrative, and that the whole story is a letter to the main character’s granddaughter. It feels like Kathleen Kent put a lot of research into the book. The honest sense of the struggle to survive in harsh show more conditions with harsher neighbors permeates the book. Kent gives us the bitter cold in the winter, the fact that if your father did not successfully hunt you went hungry, the real danger of a fire, or rot in your fields that will make your entire winter not just miserable but life-threatening. And on top of that there is mass hysteria running rampant through the countryside and being a social outcaste was much more a cause to be blamed for witchcraft than any dabbling in the black arts.
Kent did a good job making this a multi-layered story without it becoming cluttered or confusing. Uncle Roger tells stories to and spends a lot of time with Margaret and Sarah, but he also drinks and runs out on his wife. He is very kind to Sarah while she is in his house, but also insulting of Sarah’s father. And there is still a feeling that there is something beyond what we know-not necessarily witchcraft, but her mother and grandmother’s sight—that they sometimes have a feeling that someone is coming or something is going to happen, and her cousin Margaret’s “elfin look” and her little people in the cupboard who tell her to do things. Uncle Roger’s use of “conjuration” to get rid of witches. But of course, these are not the kinds of things that get people condemned of witchcraft. You are much more likely to be condemned if your crops do better than your neighbors, or you have a sharp tongue—or if you bring disease to town or are a foreigner. show less

In The Heretic’s Daughter, Kathleen Kent tells the story of her ancestor Martha Carrier, one of the women convicted for witchcraft in Salem during the Salem witch trials of 1692-1693, through the eyes of Martha’s daughter Sarah. Over the course of a couple years, we see how events – starting with a breakout of small pox – can cause people to turn on one another, how resentments can grow, and how rumours can ruin the lives of people.

This was a slow-moving book, but that in no way took show more away from the power of the book. I had tears in my eyes at numerous points in the last three chapters of the book. It was raw, poignant and heartfelt. I can’t imagine having to live through what all those people had to go through, and even reading about it just about broke my heart. To imagine having your friends and neighbours, and in some cases your family, turn against you and allow you to be condemned to hang as a witch… it’s just so depressing.

But not everything about the book was depressing. It was wonderful to see the layers of the relationships between all the family members peeled away as the book progressed. How the book starts with Sarah resenting her parents, to respecting, loving and understanding them by the end; how we understood by the end why Sarah’s father was always so standoffish; how Sarah’s mother really counted on Sarah to do the right thing. Kent wrote about real family dynamics that made that part of the book so relatable for anyone, and I think that definitely made the book that much more powerful. Because, when Sarah’s mother tells Sarah that Sarah must tell the judges whatever they want to hear, even if it means telling them that her mother is a witch… it breaks your heart. Can you even imagine having to tell people that your mother is a witch during the witch trials?

Part of what made this book so heart-wrenching was the fact that it is not only based on real-life events, but also on real people, people who really got condemned and hanged because they were believed to be witches.

This was Kent’s debut novel, and I’m definitely looking forward to what she does next. show less

Book 2
"I am amazed that this is a first novel. The book is a very fine specimen of very fine historical fiction.
Not only that but the author is a tenth generation descendant of this family from 1690s Massachusetts during the height of the Salem Witch Trials.

The novel is from the perspective of Sarah Carrier, a ten year old girl, who experiences the difficulties and challenges of this historical period in New England. This author is such an amazing storyteller. She describes the landscapes, show more townscapes to a vivid degree, the minutiae of daily life,the complex sociology of the community to the interelationships and inner lives of the inhabitants.

The conditions at the best of times are challenging but at the worst of times the author takes you into the suffering to such a degree that you start to panic and frantically want to skip pages or take long breaks from reading.

Until reading this book I did not fully understand how these atrocities could occur at the hysterical rantings of a few teenage girls. The book unfolds in such a careful yet hypnotic fashion that not only are you a reader but you become a witness to the plight of not only the Carrier family but to the adult and child witches that were accused and convicted of such utter nonsense !!

The writing is rich, intelligent and interesting:

"And what finally of the tortures of a guilty soul? What concoction is there that can be chewed and swallowed and downed in the belly to force the poison of self-recrimination back through the the pores in the skin? In what organ of the body does it reside ? A seeping wound can be bound. Salve can be dabbed to a burn or a swelling bubo. Poison can be drawn with a leech, or a lance. But guilt is a ghost that takes the shape of the body it inhabits and consumes all that is tender within its shell: brain, bowels, and heart. I cannot pluck it out like a splinter of glass or treat it with herbal brew. " "

-review by Jaidee on GoodReads show less