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CONDEMN ME NOT

Name: CONDEMN ME NOT
Author: Heather B. Moore
ISBN: 978-1-941145-95-1

ACCUSED OF WITCHCRAFT

by Heather B. Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2017

A relatable account of a shameful episode in American history, although its sensibility seems overly modern at times.

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This historical novel tells the story of Moore’s (An Ocean Away, 2017, etc.) ancestor, who was hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 17th century.

Susannah Martin (nee North, 1621–1692) was one of the 20 people, including 14 women, who were executed in the infamous Salem witchcraft trials. This novel begins in 1692 as she, along with others awaiting trial—including a 4-year-old girl—languish uncomfortably for three months in Salem Jail. In flashbacks, Susannah remembers her past, beginning in 1646. She was 25 then, living in Salisbury, Massachusetts, still a spinster, and looking to stay that way—until a handsome young widower, George Martin, moved to a neighboring farm. He flirted with her, but she didn’t believe that he was truly interested, because she considered herself “plain, short, and too round.” As the novel traces their courtship, Susannah’s early rebuffs of George’s flirtations reveal her prickly, stubborn personality, a lifelong characteristic: “Calling me a troublemaker is highly accurate,” she notes. “I’ve never been one to keep my opinions to myself.” She was first accused of witchcraft in 1669 (the charges were dropped, but Susannah’s reputation was damaged); later, she and George became embroiled in several lawsuits and court battles with the local Putnam family, losing many decisions. After her husband’s death, Susannah was impoverished, leaving her vulnerable, and on July 19, 1692, she and four others were executed by hanging. Moore does a good job of illustrating her ancestor’s predicament. Susannah’s own words, from real-life trial records, are especially affecting, such as when she laughs at the fits of her accusers, who were young girls: “Well I may at such folly.” However, the couple’s many scenes of courtship become repetitive, smacking of high school dating with its jealousies and snits. Although the book appears well-researched, for the most part, its version of Puritanism can seem ahistorical, allowing such things as loose hair and dancing. And although Moore calls out the issues that led to the accusations, such as the Putnam family’s money, power, and greed for land, she pays little attention to the accusers themselves, and what, besides their parents’ political interests, led to their mass hysteria.

A relatable account of a shameful episode in American history, although its sensibility seems overly modern at times.

Pub Date: March 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-941145-95-1

Page Count: -

Publisher: Mirror Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.