about the book
Finals and college applications are not the only things students at St. Joan’s High School of Danvers must worry about: their classmates are falling ill.
Is it just the pressure placed on them by their exclusive school? Could it be a reaction to the HPV vaccine? Pollution? Something more sinister? Or are the girls just faking?
As her classmates have seizures, facial tics, and a variety of other symptoms, Colleen begins researching the Salem Witch Trials and The Crucible for class. She discovers that Danvers was once Salem Village, where there was a similarly odd epidemic three hundred years ago.
In the middle of all this, the media has descended on Danvers and is trying to figure out who, or what, to blame.
Will Colleen figure out the cause of the epidemic from her research into the seventeenth century colonial life? And if she does, is there a cure?
about the author
Katherine Howe based Conversion off of a real-life, recent incident at a high school in Le Roy, New York. Coincidentally, she was in the middle of teaching The Crucible to one of her classes at Cornell and was only one hour away from ground zero. In both cases, real and fictional, a group of adults create their own agenda; Katherine wanted to explore what the teenage students were experiencing.
Katherine always found witches interesting, but didn’t seriously think about them till grad school, where she was living one town away from Salem, Massachusetts. She recently edited The Penguin Book of Witches, a primary-source about witches and witch-hunting.
She has hosted “Salem: Unmasking the Devil” for the National Geographic Channel.
Katherine is a direct descendant of three accused Salem witches. One of them, Deliverance Dane, was the subject of her first novel, but she didn’t know they were related till after the book was already written!
Katherine is a Texas native, but lives in Massachusetts and upstate New York with her family. She teaches at Cornell while working on her novels.
Sources :
Author website
Author biography: Amazon
Author interview: Book Page
Author interview: Jezebel
Author video interview
Also by Katherine Howe:
The House of Velvet and Glass. Hyperion Press. 2012.
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