The Heretic's Daughter
Kathleen Kent
Reviewed by Megan Chance
The Salem Witch Trials have been an abiding interest of mine since childhood. I’ve read nearly every book (both fiction and non-fiction) on the subject I could find, and have spent more than my fair share of time poring over Essex County court and arrest transcripts. I had thought there was nothing new to be read about them.
But Kathleen Kent’s THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER, while not exactly ‘something new,’ is not exactly the same old story either.
First off, she is writing her family history: Kent is a descendent of Martha Carrier, one of the nineteen accused witches hanged in Salem. In this telling, Kent has been constrained by the facts of her ancestor’s life in the way fiction writers always are when dealing with real people, and yet she has also been lucky enough to have as a subject a family fascinating in its own right, even without the witch trials.
The Carriers lived in Andover, a town in Essex County near Salem Village, but not in the thick of the terror until later. This remove may be the book’s greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness–the melodrama of the trials does not enter into the Carrier lives until late in the story, and so instead we are treated to the trials and tribulations of everyday life in 17th Century New England while horror circles the periphery. While this keeps the players distant from the action and thus removes them from the immediacy of it, it also allows the reader to feel the long reach of fate as the accusers begin to widen their circle, and illustrates very well how no one known to the accusers—no matter how peripherally—was safe.
Kent chooses to write the story not through the eyes of Martha Carrier herself, but through those of her ten-year old daughter, and while Sarah’s voice and narrative seem at times a little too mature and knowing, the conceit of the book is that she is relating these events as an adult, with an adult’s understanding. What is not lost, however, is the sense of helplessness and fear a child feels when surrounded by injustice and betrayal and things she can only barely understand as she is swept away in the unrelenting tide of mass hysteria.
The story is a patient one—I was some ways into it before I realized how caught up I was in the characters. And the story is really more about this family and the ties that bind them to each other and to their community than it is about the Witch Trials themselves—which, while all important, also seem oddly incidental. But this is one of the best things about the book: that the accusation of Martha Carrier seems both inevitable and yet escapable shows a real truth—that what makes us heroes is that which is often thrust upon us.
This is also a coming of age story. Children should not have to experience or understand such horror, but they often do, and a real life has more twists and turns than any fictional one. These slow growths and dawning realizations end up creating a story that builds upon itself beautifully, until the end result is powerful and effective, with a strong sense of time and place. Add to that a compelling family history and dynamic, and you have a truly haunting tale of horror, redemption and human frailty, and the triumph of soul in a world gone mad.
This is a story readers will not quickly forget.
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About the Reviewer:
Megan Chance is the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of several novels. Her first book won Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA award for excellence in Romantic Fiction, and since then, her novels have received several awards and award nominations. The Best Reviews has said she writes “Fascinating historical fiction.” A former television news photographer with a BA from Western Washington University, Megan Chance lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two daughters. Visit her website at www.meganchance.com.
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