Sharp Words

6 out of 10

Kathleen Kent is a descendant of Martha Carrier, one of the women accused of witchcraft during the Salem trials of the 1690s; this is her first novel, and it’s the story of Martha from the point of view of her daughter Sarah, who was aged about eleven at the time of the trials. Sarah and her older brothers were also accused and imprisoned, although eventually freed; their mother however was tried and hanged as a witch.

It’s an interesting story, written well in the first person. I didn’t find it the easiest of reads though, and it took me a while to get into it. Although I don’t normally notice stylistic issues (since I favour content over style when reading fiction), the print on my copy was pretty big, which made for paragraphs which seemed to take up half a page and made concentration a bit difficult at times.

As with The River, By Moonlight, I got a real sense of time-and-place from this novel; I found fascinating its descriptions of the daily trials of the colonists. However, as a non-American reader, I felt that Kathleen Kent made too many assumptions about what the reader would know about the Salem witch trials. There was no real background given to them, even in a fore- or afterword… and since I knew next-to-nothing (and still know very little) about the trials (apart from having watched the film of The Crucible years ago), I was left feeling rather confused about what on earth was happening. On the other hand, that does give a connection with the novel’s protagonist, Sarah, who also has very little idea of what’s going on and why.

If you’re someone who has an interest in the witch trials (or even if I’d done some research myself – although I prefer not to do so before reading a novel for the first time), this would definitely be a worthwhile read. And I did develop a certain amount of empathy for the characters and a deep interest in their story.  But though, as the second of my Blog Stop Book Tours reviews for September, this was the book I was most interested to read; in the end, the one I hadn’t been that bothered about (The River, By Moonlight) was my favourite of the two.