A Bane In Salem: A Tale of the Salem Witch Trials

In case you are unfamiliar with Salem, it's the village where a witch hunt was carried out, people were arrested, tortured, died in prison, put on trial and, in around 20 cases, executed for being witches.

This ia a fictional account of one young girl who went through most of that process. The story involves real people who were part of that dark period in American history. Letitia has a best friend, Constance. Letitia's story is told as she sees things beginning to change in the village with neighbors suddenly becoming enemies, people being arrested for being alleged witches, trials that, by our standards today, would be laughed out of court and the prosecuting lawyers lose their license to practice law. <

It's a world of Puritans were very, very strict religious expectations were made of everyone. Letitia's problem starts with her parents want her to allow one guy to court her while, at the same time, she's attracted to a different guy.

The story also shows how events followed a pattern; a few young people start to accuse others of attacking them using dark magic which leads to some arrests which leads to more young people becoming accusers which leads to even more arrests, trials and the start of the hangings (and, in one case, a guy dying from rocks being piled on his body.)

Cotton Mather was a main character in all of this and basically, at least in my opinion, he was a religious fanatic and a major power-mad bully. By the way, one of the people accused of witchcraft was all of four years old.

It also explains the water trial, how a suspected witch was put into a dunking chair then put into a pond. If she didn't die she was quite obviously a witch and could then be hung; if she drowned, then she was innocent (but still quite dead.)

(Notice the word 'she.' Around 85% of all people tried to witchcraft in American and Europe were women. This very probably relates to the negative image of women that religion has fostered and society has accepted.)

(There's also something I thought of after reading the book. Tituba the slave was black. All the people killed were white. Could her willing work with the judges have been a way of taking advantage of a situation that is already bad and getting back at the white people who had so abused her by turning her into a slave? )

I think the book has done a very good job of showing what was going on and doing that with believable characters.