This review and more published on The Young Girl Who Loved Books.

This book is filled with all of my favorite things. Those are magic, conflict, witches, and historical fiction. A book about the witch trials sounds quite good to me! I picked this up on a whim one day at my favorite bookstore. It was on the three dollar shelf. It is worth so much more than that to me. It was a beautiful book.

The books start out in a beautiful way, ‘I am Mary. I am a witch.’ Quickly we realize that this book is about a nifty teenage girl in 1659. This is during the time that people are quite superstitious.

Tragedy hits when her grandmother is arrested, tortured, abused, and then hanged in the town square. She has been accused of being a witch. They went on a hunt and unfortunately their narrowmindedness has cost her life. They did a series of "tests" that were supposed to prove if she was a witch. Mary witnessed that. When that happened, she realized she had to flee to safety, before the town turned on her also.

Ultimately Mary gets rescued by an unusual, rich woman. She believes this woman is hiding something. She believes the detail she is hiding is that she is Mary's mother. They are Puritan how are fleeing to the new world. Will they find out who she is? Will she be discovered and killed?

This was a captivating and utterly beautiful story. It was addictive and quite a page turner. The story is told in a series of journal or diary entries that have been sewed into a quilt. I enjoyed this detail. It gave the reader a sense of urgency, a sense of fear, and a sense of what the character might have felt. This is a super tragic story that ends in a powerful way. The history just seemed to ooze off of every page.

Mary, herself, was an interesting character. She was robust and determined. She had a spirit that was all her own. She has been forced to be brave. She had emotions that were raw; she was intense at times. She was your typical teenager. She was very realistic which made it all that more believable.

All the other characters were very well rounded and real. The story had quite a small cast of characters which made it easy to understand. There was the Reverend Johnson, which is a puritan who seems to believe that he is a prophet of God. Martha, who is the woman who takes Mary and saved her. Also Jaybird, the Native American boy who became one of her only friends. There were more, but I wanted to highlight some of the main ones.

I had an issue with the pace of this story. I felt like sometimes it left things unclear, or quickly passed over them. What type of magic did they have? Why did the Puritans believe people were witches? What made them believe Grandmother was a witch?

Overall, this book was a well-written story that possesses diverse characters, beautiful writing, and a mind blowing intense plot. A book that is determined to cause an addiction.

“In the town live witches nine: three in worsted, three in rags, and three in velvet fine...”

This was one of my favorite books in middle-school for various reasons that I seemed to forget before picking it up last night. I suppose I'll warn you right away: this is a fast book. If you are a seasoned reader like me you could tear through this in about- perhaps- two hours if you don't take many breaks. The writing flows so well. On the other hand- it's not distancing in the way so historical fiction it is- the main character, Mary, is simply a woman of few words and Rees lets her speak in her strange, cold way.

"Maybe it was the sea glittering beneath him, but his eyes seemed full of coins."

So what makes this book so good? Well, I think I can remember. This book is so immersive- all these details from vocabulary to clothing to food- you can't help but feel like you have time traveled 400 years into the past. This is a frightening time, however, and I couldn't help but feel a little bit scared of the dark in 2015 after I finished.

I also appreciated how Celia Rees highlighted the good and bad of Puritan culture- on one hand, you have a group of people that seek to live peaceful, pious lives without persecution- and on the other, you can see how religious zeal and corrupt power dynamics can do more harm than good. I also appreciated how Celia Rees highlighted native-american culture- that, no- the indigenous people were not one "people" that they had different languages, cultures, etc. from each other.

“Lies are not rooted in the mind in the way truth is.”

The only criticism I can give- if there is any to give at all, is that the novel felt incomplete. This is half the story- Witch Child is a duology. I thought this was unnecessary for many reasons. The magic, characters, etc.- nothing was resolved when it certainly could have been- It was almost as if the 1st act had just finished when the book came to a close.

Witch Child had it’s merits, though it was only toward the end that I really began to enjoy it. I feel that very little was said that could not have been made better in a shorter format.
The story was open-ended, which I enjoyed (though I have little interest in reading the sequel), the pacing was good and, particularly after their arrival in Beulah, there grew a strong mood which carried until the end.
Unfortunately, enjoying the novel meant swamping through a few inconsistencies which had me exasperated from the start.
Firstly, and on a more minor note, the tenses were all over the place. I understand that, with a diary being a personal document that contains information about the past and present, there will be some overlap, but sometimes it felt as though this weaving of tenses had confused Celia Rees herself, as they seemed to be dotted about willy-nilly.
Secondly, there was a bit of divergence between the narrative style and the... narrative style. On the whole the book was very straightforward in its prose style: ‘She did this, then he said that, then they went here.’, which would not be my preferred style for a book of this tensity, but nonetheless worked for Rees. But every now and again a paragraph of ill fitting, almost flowery prose would be slotted in as if Rees was reminding herself to include some atmosphere. I personally feel that she should have trusted her own ability to build tension without those additions, which were immersion breaking.
Finally, it surprised me when I finished this book and turned it over to read the back cover, that it was meant to be read by TEENAGERS. I thought, as dark as the material was, that this couldn’t have been written for anybody over the age of twelve. I do not know what it is that causes so many teen fiction writers to believe that they need to condescend their audience, when most have adult reading capabilities and more world experience than many seniors I can think of. This was not a patronising book, but it was oversimplified, and I think that is a shame, as this could have made a great piece of horror if Rees had allowed herself to pour all of her abilities and development into it, without thinking about her target audience.

The last quarter of the book is what saved it from getting a 3 star review from me. It's pretty slow going for the majority of the book. Not a bad read, and that last fourth was pretty riveting. The ending was well handled for the "journal" format. I liked that questions went unanswered. A first person POV shouldn't really have all the answers and a journal surely doesn't need to have its endings tied up in a neat little bow, because life's not that way. I like that I'm left wondering things without it being an abrupt cliff hanger.

So, yes the ending is the saving grace of the story. Would I read the sequel, [b:Sorceress|300017|Sorceress (Witch Child, #2)|Celia Rees|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1394830402s/300017.jpg|1122314]? Sure. Why not? It's an easy read and I'm curious.

I listened to the audio version of this. Even though the speaker’s voice almost put me to sleep, I still really enjoyed this! Of course, I love anything associated with witchcraft in the 1600s.

This was written in journal entries. Even though I went into it knowing it was fiction, by the end, I was like, “Wait...WAS that true?? Noooo...WAS it????” Great ending!

A bland rewrite of The Crucible with a few Native American tropes thrown in.