Chosen in October 2023, the blurb sounded of a similar vein to a book I’d enjoyed called The Witchfinder’s Sister by Beth Underdown. Both books feature a character called Matthew Hopkins, who in real life was a ruthless English witch-hunter and self-styled Witchfinder General. His career flourished during the English Civil War 1642-1651 and he was prevalent in the East Anglian area of England. His job as a witch-finder lasted from 1644-1647, but during those three years, he and his colleague sent more people to be hanged for witchcraft than all previous witch-finders in the preceding 160 years.
“In seventeenth-century England, a female healer enflames the fury of a witchfinder in this propulsive novel about murder, revenge, and the dangerous power of knowledge.
Mary Fawcett refines the healing recipes she’s inherited from generations of women before her—an uncanny and moral calling to empathize with the sick. When witchfinder Matthew Hopkins arrives in her small village, stoking the fires of hate, he sees not healing but the devil at work. Mary’s benevolent skills have now cast her and her young brother under suspicion of witchery.
Soon, the husband of one of Mary’s patients is found murdered, his body carved with strange symbols. For Hopkins, it’s further evidence of dark arts. When the whispering village turns against her, Mary dares to trust a stranger: an enigmatic alchemist, scarred body and soul, who knows the dead man’s secrets.
As Hopkins’s fervor escalates, Mary must outsmart the devil himself to save her life and the lives of those she loves. Unfolding the true potential of her gifts could make Mary a more empowered adversary than a witchfinder ever feared.”
At under 300 pages this was a quick read. I found the start of the book interesting, but as the story progressed the plot started to veer off tangent and I wasn’t sure what I was reading, a murder mystery, a story about how women were mistreated in the 17th Century, or a book about the supernatural. I know the novel is a mixed genre, but I didn’t feel the author knew where the storyline was heading, so it just became a confusing mash-up of a tale.
Mary Fawcett is a young woman who is a talented healer. She has studied the recipes of her ancestors and refined them so that she can help the weak and sick in her village. Her parents are dead and so she is looking after her young brother Tom who was born with a club foot. The other children avoid him, so his best friend is a crow he named Greedyguts.
When the witch-finder Matthew Hopkins arrives in the village, Mary’s behaviour is a cause of concern to him. He doesn’t see a healer in front of him, he sees someone who is completing the devils work, and Greedyguts is her familiar. When one of Mary’s patients is found murdered, with strange symbols carved into the torso, it gives Hopkins more ammunition to accuse Mary of witchcraft.
As Mary faces a growing feeling of unease when the villagers start to turn against her, she decides her only option is to put her trust in a stranger for help. It turns out the stranger is an alchemist who knows all about the dead man and so the pair must depart to London for the mystery to be solved and for Mary and her loved ones to be saved.
The book does have a tense atmosphere and plainly shows the gender inequality of the seventeenth century. Women healers and their herbal remedies were treated with suspicion, yet their male counterparts who were obsessed with alchemy and experimenting with ideas were considered noble men of science.
“A receipt for the cure of the falling sickness
Take 3 ounces of dead men’s skull which you may have at the apothecary’s, 4 ounces of mistletoe of the oak, 4 ounces of red coral, 4 ounces of wood betony, let all these be wiped dry and clean, then dry them and beat them to fine powder and mix them together . . .” (from The Receipt Book of Catherine Bacon.)
Each chapter starts with part of a healing recipe from the 17th century, and the full recipe, for those who are interested, is written at the end of the book, together with details of the original text that it has been taken from. I found this interesting and therefore expected a book full of historical details, however, the language used throughout the book is very modern and I didn’t get that sense of 17th century East Anglia at all.
I also didn’t get much sense of a historical accuracy through the characters either. Mary is very poor, living off porridge, yet manages to afford ginger and mallet leaves for her potions. Whilst ginger would have been available in the 17th century, it wouldn’t have been readily available to the poor. Women healers would be using recipes that were handed down from generation to generation which relied on plants that were easy to find in British hedgerows or fields, they wouldn’t be using imports. The alchemists and medicine men would be able to afford to use more exotic ingredients, which included herbs and spices from abroad, but not a single woman trying to scrape together enough money for plain food. So how did Mary have these ingredients to hand?
I was interested in Mary’s story which showed how hard it was to survive during that period in history.
“Witches aren’t discovered, but rather created in the minds of people.”
You could almost liken the period to modern day social media. One person sows a seed of doubt in another’s mind and soon a made-up bit of gossip is treated as gospel. Someone who has done nothing wrong is treated like a social pariah just because someone else has taken an intense dislike to them, whether that be because of jealousy, spite, judgement or hypocrisy.
Tension is created throughout the book because we are made aware of what happens if someone is successfully accused of witchcraft, and there were times when you knew that Tom would accidentally say or do something which would not only endanger Mary’s life, but his too. I felt like I could throttle the child, who technically was old enough to know better. My main cause of worry throughout the book was whether Greedyguts the crow would survive. The bird had more depth of character than most of the humans in the book and so his welfare was paramount to me!
Mary was supposed to be a strong, independent woman, fighting for her rights and basic survival, yet she was so naive about all the people who surrounded her and what they thought of her. She just seemed to drift through the story, one moment being sensitive to people’s needs and ailments, the next being totally negligent. She never felt like a fully developed character, and as this was her story to tell, it weakened the narrative.
The story is entertaining but not rememberable and I felt like the final confrontation was weak and rushed. I think the plot could have been made to work with several adjustments, and the characters needed more work to make me understand them. I never got the sense of who someone was, whether they could be trusted or not, I just felt like I was being told ‘this is Matthew, he’s a baddy, this is Mary, she’s the goody, and this is Robert Sudbury who is a bit of a mystery.
This was a book that started out with promise and got steadily weaker, and by the end the plot had chopped and changed so much, that people and events just seemed to appear making little sense, but at least they brought the book to an end.
Genre: Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Gothic, Witches, Mystery Thriller
Release Date: 3rd October 2023
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Pages: 282
“Disclosure: If you buy books linked to this site, I may earn a small commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops, at no extra cost to you.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.