Conversion - Hardcover

Howe, Katherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399167773 ISBN 13: 9780399167775

Verlag: PUTNAM YOUNG READERS, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane comes a chilling mystery—Prep meets The Crucible.
 
It’s senior year at St. Joan’s Academy, and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together. Until they can’t.
 
First it’s the school’s queen bee, Clara Rutherford, who suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Her mystery illness quickly spreads to her closest clique of friends, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumor; rumor blossoms into full-blown panic.
 
Soon the media descends on Danvers, Massachusetts, as everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Or are the girls faking? Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . .
 
Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell. With her signature wit and passion, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what’s really happening to the girls at St. Joan’s?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Katherine Howe is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and The House of Velvet and Glass. She is a lecturer in American Studies at Cornell University. She is also a direct descendant of three of the women accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch trials, one who was hanged and two who survived. Her books have been published around the world in 23 languages to date. Visit her at www.katherinehowe.com and follow her on twitter @KatherineBHowe.

Katherine Howe is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and The House of Velvet and Glass. She is a lecturer in American Studies at Cornell University. She is also a direct descendant of three of the women accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch trials, one who was hanged and two who survived. Her books have been published around the world in 23 languages to date. Visit her at www.katherinehowe.com and follow her on twitter@KatherineBHowe.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2014 Katherine Howe 

P R E L U D E

SALEM VILLAGE, MASSACHUSETTS

MAY 30, 1706




How long must I wait?

His tongue creeps out the corner of his mouth while
he writes, the tip of it black with ink, the blacking in his gums staining his teeth. He looks like he’s got a mouthful of tar. I’ve been waiting for some time, but Reverend Green’s still writing. His quill runs across the paper, scratching like mouse paws. Scratch scratch, dip, scratch, lick, scratch.

My feet ache, and shifting my weight just makes the one hurt worse than the other. I’m leaning in the door frame, and in my mind my mother prods me in my back to make me straight. It’s so sharp, the prodding, I could almost swear she was really there.

“Ann?” he says.

I’d gotten so used to the waiting that I don’t hear him at first.

“Ann!” He’s tossed his quill down.

“Yes,” I whisper.

He turns a chill eye on me, an arm over the back of his chair. His elbow’s worn the turkey-work well away, ’til it’s so threadbare, it shines. Reverend Green’s the kind of man who’s always being interrupted. A harassed look about him, as if he can never get time to concentrate on one thing altogether. Spends his whole life turning around in his chair.

I take a step back, thinking better of my errand. He gives me a long look. He’s none too eager to hear what I’ve got to say either.

“Well, you’d best come in,” he says at length, returning to his paper.

He hunches over his desk, free hand clutching bunches of his hair
like he’s anxious to finish whatever he’s writing. Scratch scratch scratch.

I should’ve gone when I had the chance; he’d never’ve known I was here. I glance over my shoulder, through the parsonage hall. Goody Green, his wife, has got the fire going all right, but the door’s open to the yard, as it’s a warm day. The patch of sunlight on the floor is so bright, I have to squint. A long stretch of shadow, and a cat wraps around the doorjamb and flattens himself out in the sunshine with a yawn. He rolls on his back, batting at ghosts.

Goody Green’s at the table wringing out cheesecloth. She looks harried, and no wonder, with the baby hiccoughing so. She was bouncing him up and down the hall when I arrived, beating him over her shoulder. I said she should hold him upside down and give him a little shake, but she glared and said, “If you’ll just wait for Reverend Green over there.”

I not being a mother, I suppose she’d ignore my advice, though it’s common knowledge how many Putnams I raised myself. Now I see she’s given up. The baby’s stashed in a long wooden cradle near enough that she can rock it with a foot, but she’s just letting him cough, all red in the face like a baked apple. And to be sure she can’t call on anyone for so much as a poultice.

No one can, in the village, anymore.

“Go on, then,” she says to me, giving the cloth a final twist. She’s got some arms, has Goody Reverend Green. “Don’t you keep him waiting.”

If she weren’t there, I could sneak away. I feel my heart pressing against my ribs, and the top of my head opening, as if my soul were being ripped from my body by the hair.

A girl in a dirty coif wanders in from the yard, finger in her mouth, her apron splotched with mud. She looks over at me all shy, because she doesn’t know me, or perhaps because she’s been warned to keep away. She’s like a sweet piglet walking on two legs, with those pink cheeks all in mud like that, and I smile at her. She squeaks in terror and runs to hide behind her mother.

“Come now, Ann,” the Reverend coaxes me from within his study.

It’s cooler in there. It’s away from the kitchen fire, with its window over the side yard, facing away from the sun. I’d like to sit. My feet
are so tired.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

But there is.

There is everything to be afraid of.

I swallow the lead ball in my throat that no amount of swallowing can be rid of, and move into the shadows of the Reverend’s study. There’s a bench between his desk and the fireplace. It’s as hard as a church pew. I could swear the back isn’t so much straight as curved, to force my head to bow. But it’s not the bench that’s making me hang my head.

The Reverend gingerly sands his paper, blows it clean, and blots, holding the paper to the light to approve of his work. Satisfied, he turns at last to me.

But when his eyes fall on my face, he recoils, as if I’d moved to strike him.

I’ve come to Reverend Green to make my confession.

Part 1

JANUARY

Y U LE T I D E



And it was at Jerusalem

the feast of the dedication,

and it was winter.

JOHN 10:22
 

CHAPTER 1

DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS

WEDNESDAY, JANUAR Y 11, 2012




The truth is, I’m not sure when it started. I don’t actually think anybody really knows.

For a while figuring out the very first instance of it seemed really important. They were interviewing all of us because they wanted to find the locus of it, or whatever, I don’t really know. They marched us into the office one at a time, and there was this big map of the school up on a wall. It was covered in pins with little flags, each one with a date. It was super complicated. I think they thought that with enough pins and flags and yarn and everything, they’d figure it out, or at least it would look really impressive for the news cameras. And don’t get me wrong, it was impressive. All those arrows and everything looked wicked complicated. It didn’t help them figure anything out, though. I think it just made them feel better.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

If I was really forced to pick a date, like at gunpoint, I’d have to go with January 11. I’m saying that only because it was just a completely basic Wednesday with nothing much to recommend it.

Exactly the kind of day I shouldn’t remember.

We’d been back from winter break only a couple of days, but we’d already gotten into the routine. Senior year. Last semester. We were pretty keyed up. I mean, everybody’s always on edge when the semester starts, kind of, except spring semester senior year is like that normal nervousness times a million. Senior year is when it all comes together, all the years of studying and work and projects and sports and campaigns and whatever we’re into that we’ve been working really hard for—it’s either about to pay off or everything is about to completely fall apart. And don’t even get me started about waiting for college acceptance letters. But even though senior year is massive, is basically the moment that sets up the rest of our entire lives and whether we’re going to be successful and get everything we want or whether we’re going to die alone in a ditch in the snow, we still have to get up and make it through every day. I still get up and brush my teeth, right?

This Wednesday should have been the most generic Wednesday imaginable, even if it was a Wednesday of the spring semester of our last year at St. Joan’s.

“Sit,” my mother said.

I was standing by the kitchen sink shoving a cranberry muffin...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PUTNAM YOUNG READERS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0399167773
• ISBN 13: 9780399167775
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 402
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar