The Manningtree witches A novel

Award-winning English poet Blakemore's debut novel recounts the harrowing story of a historical witch-hunt in Manningtree, Essex, during the English Civil War. With men away fighting, fields lie fallow, and famine threatens. Fear and jealousy fuel hostility towards the "poor and peculiar" women of the town. A familiar tale of sexually tinged persecution unwinds with the arrival of Puritan witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins. Teenage Rebecca chafes at the meager life her widowed mother, the reckless and quarrelsome Beldam West, is constrained to lead. Rebecca longs for more. Hopkins, meanwhile, casts her, like her mother, as the devil's creature. Manningtree Witches is notable for the beauty of Blakemore's language. Her poetic imagery exquisitely conjures ambiance, character, and period detail. Clouds are "bruisy and doomful of rain;" the women at trial, "an assortment of sour shapes in rags." The well-realized principal characters are more than simply victims and villains. Rebecca, who has "taught herself to watch and listen," perceives the tangled impulses and moral and spiritual ambiguities of those around her. Will she use that knowledge to save herself?

The inventive, sharp-witted debut from poet Blakemore (Humbert Summer) draws on the Puritan witch trials of Civil War England, when several women were executed for witchcraft in 1645 Manningtree. The book opens with 19-year-old Rebecca West's tour-de-force description of her heavily snoring mother, the vulgar but undeniably formidable Beldam (a name, Rebecca notes, that "suits her, because it sounds wide and wicked"). Claustrophobic Manningtree is abuzz with the arrival of Matthew Hopkins, a mysterious, moneyed gentleman from Suffolk who later becomes the self-styled "Witchfinder General." In lust with clerk John Edes, Rebecca barely notices Hopkins, but then a local boy becomes inexplicably ill, and the cause is determined to be "bewitchment," with Rebecca's mother fingered as a guilty party. The collective obsession with Satan begins to manifest in strange ways for Rebecca, permeating her dreams and waking life with explicitly sexual imagery as things progress with John and she herself comes under suspicion of witchcraft. While Blakemore's commitment to historical verisimilitude may have kept this from reaching greater imaginative heights (chapters are prefaced by excerpts from the primary source documents to which they correspond), the author is a devastatingly good prose stylist. On the whole, Blakemore's ambitious and fresh take on the era will delight readers. (Aug.)

A young woman and her mother become targets of the witch hunts of 17th-century England. Rebecca West and her mother are working to make ends meet as seamstresses in poverty-stricken Manningtree, England, a village filled with women who gossip, bicker, and attempt to care for their families as the men are away fighting in the country's numerous wars. Rebecca is quietly in love with the town clerk, John Edes, whom she meets with regularly to study Scripture and learn to read. But once Matthew Hopkins, a man who comes to be known as the Witchfinder, arrives, suspicion brews between neighbors, especially when a child is taken ill and Hopkins suspects witches are consorting with the devil. Rebecca, her mother, and numerous other village women are arrested and jailed for more than a year before their trial, as Hopkins works to shore up witnesses, including John Edes. In Blakemore's debut novel, her background as a poet is clear. The language is striking, full of distinctive insights regarding gender, truth, and religious devotion even as the narrative perspective shifts from Rebecca to Hopkins to varying townspeople. Rebecca's voice as she narrates the fates of the women on trial for witchcraft is unapologetic and luminous, and her mother's defiance and love for her daughter are fierce; as she tells Rebecca, "Witch is just their nasty word for anyone who makes things happen, who moves the story along." The sections in which Hopkins contemplates his manipulative investigations are duller and slow the plot's momentum, especially toward the end. Still, historical fiction has rarely felt so immediate. An immersive story with striking prose. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.