Celia Rees

There are tons of books set in World War II but not many set in the immediate period after the war. Yes, as this book shows, it is just as ripe a period for literature as the war years.

Edith Graham is a single school teacher who lived in Coventry during World War II. As the unmarried sister she was expected to continue to live with her mother and take care of her. The family was most upset when they discovered that she had taken a posting in Germany with the British Control Commission show more helping to get the education system restarted in Germany. At least that was her cover story; she was also recruited by her cousin Leo who was with MI6 to learn as much as she could about Nazis who were in hiding. Leo was particularly interested in their mutual friend Kurt von Stabenow who had gone to Oxford before the war and become friendly with Leo and more than friendly with Edith. Kurt had trained as a doctor and so was an asset to the Nazi extermination and experimentation process. Edith had been devastated when she went to visit him before the war and learned that Kurt was engaged to a Prussian countess. On a later trip she met Kurt's wife, Elizabeth, and to her surprise rather liked her. Leo thought that if Edith could find Elizabeth then she would lead them to Kurt. Dori, another friend of Edith's who had been a spy during the war, also wanted to find von Stabenow because she thought he was responsible for the deaths of a number of women spies who were caught during the war. Dori wants Kurt brought to justice but Leo on behalf of the British government wants to recruit him to work in research. So everyone is using Edith for their own ends and she has mixed feelings about that. Nevertheless she is more successful than an amateur could be expected to be which draws her into danger. The ending caught me completely by surprise.

The recipes and menus that introduce each chapter really bring this book to another level. They are included because Edith uses recipes to send coded messages to Dori based upon an old cookbook. The author found just such a cookbook in her aunt's home while cleaning after her death. Her aunt had, like Edith, worked in Germany after the war and inside the cookbook there were numerous handwritten recipes which was all that remained of correspondence from that time. Such is the genesis of an intriguing book. show less

Like many women my age, I grew up reading Scholastic paperbacks about the Salem Witch Trials, all with the same underlying message: how terrible that the innocent were (and are) persecuted simply for appearing slightly different. Rees takes this laudable enough idea and stretches it farther - what if the girls really were witches, and therefore, by the standards of a Christian society, not 'innocent' at all? Still not ok to persecute them, right? And to take it yet another step further, what show more if one of these girls did what all of us young readers hoped those doomed Salem victims would do, and decide she didn't want to just sit around to get crushed with rocks or hanged, and fought to save herself? 100 percent historically accurate it may not be, but MAN this book is a satisfying read. And re-read. show less

Sorceress by Celia Rees is the sequel to Witch Child and the conclusion of Mary Newbury’s story. Mary had been brought to the New World as a servant to a pilgrim family. At the end of the previous book, Mary had been accused of witchcraft and had fled into the North American wilderness. She was found by her Indian friends White Eagle and Jaybird, and went on to marry Jaybird and have children with him. They lived with the Pennacook people peacefully for a number of years but in 1675, King show more Philip’s War saw the death of her husband and changes for Mary and her offspring.

Mary eventually finds a home with the Iroquois but in fact, she was a magical being and was able to work spells, but her inclination was toward healing. The book is told in two distinct timelines, one being Mary’s time in the 1600s while the other being set in today as a descendant of Mary’s traces her ancestor.

I enjoyed this story as the author obviously did a lot of research into the life styles of the Indians in the 1600s. She accurately recounts the history and shows how Europeans had little to no understanding of the natives and how the strict religious practices of the white people had no room for the Indian’s more mystical beliefs. Sorceress was both an excellent story of one woman’s life and a thrilling read about the clash between two cultures. show less

[This is a review I wrote in 2007]

**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 show more 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+ show less