Year in (Book) Review: The Heretic's Daughter

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. Favorite book of the year (so far) goes to the hauntingly beautiful writing of Kathleen Kent in The Heretic's Daughter. Recommended to me by my writing partner (and I use that term loosely, since in between our brief flashes of brilliance we spend most of our time gossiping and talking about her charmingly frustrating four year old), it is the first book in a long time that's kept me up way past my bedtime, because I just had to have one more chapter in me before I closed my eyes.

First, the backstory. Ms. Kent, as many of us do, grew up with stories of her ancestors. One in particular was Martha Carrier, who would have been her grandmother nine times back or something like that. One of the most prominent figures in the infamous Salem witch trials of the late 1600s, Martha was hung for being outspoken, critical of the judiciary process she was held slave to, and for generally not being well-liked by her neighbors. That's pretty much all it took in those days, in that town. The author was so fascinated by the stories that she spent a significant amount of time researching both the trials themselves and her own family's involvement. She dug through historical research, myriad archives and transcripts, and her family's memories. The result is her debut novel, and I think it is really lovely.

Told from the fictional perspective of Martha's young daughter (the daughter was real, just the storytelling was imagined), Kent brings to life an absolutely beautiful and devastatingly harsh time. Fear of Indian attacks ran rampant. Smallpox swept unceremoniously through households and towns and killed in indiscriminant multitudes. The Puritanical life was barren. But, as Kent gently reminds us, families were close to and dependent upon one another, and kids were, as they will always be, kids. Sarah, our narrator, is equal parts stubborn -- like her mother -- and sarcastically observant of the iniquities of the time. She witnesses, and experiences first hand, some of the worst atrocities our country has been responsible for committing against our own. It was terrifying, and Kent does justice to the enormity of the situation, without ever once being flowery or overly stylistic. She stays true to the voice and nature of her characters, and since they wouldn't be melodramatic in the telling of their tale, neither is Kent.

She writes poetically, effortlessly. It's a distinctive style and specific to the era, but she never forces anything on her readers. It flows, and she paints. They say that an actor has to respect whomever it is that they are portraying, even if the audience sees an evil tyrant or a selfish drunk ... both of whom appear in The Heretic's Daughter. Somehow, though, all of Kent's characters are beloved and heartwarming ... well, okay, maybe not all of them, but the main ones, anyway -- even the most fatally flawed of the bunch.

It's a slow unfolding, so if you're looking for action, action, action you should probably put this one on hold for now. But if you decide to pick it up, and I hope, hope, hope you will, have a computer close by -- I found myself repeatedly needing to Wikipedia the people and circumstances she was describing, because it was so unbelievable to me that this stuff really happened. It really did.