The Heretics Daughter
by Kathleen Kent

Release Date: 23rd Jan 2009
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 978 0 2307 0443 5
RRP: £14.99

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Kent offers you a taste of what it was like at the time of the Salem Witch Trials...

This debut novel by Kathleen Kent is given some added weight by the sheer fact that she is a direct descendent of the novel's protagonist - Martha Carrier. It would be impossible to say, however, how much fictional licence has been utilised in order to make the book more interesting to the reader - although my immediate reaction is little must have been added for it rather dry and altogether too gritty - lacking as it is in embellishments and flowery pretences.
The Heretic's Daughter is therefore a relatively real account of the Salem Witch Trials that so encumbered an era of America's history and blighted the lives of hundreds of people. First and foremost, it is a tale of an unusual family that is transformed from the seemingly disparate and unfeeling to the closely guarded and deeply moving.

Told as though from the memory's of Martha Carrier's surviving daughter - Sarah - the account of day to day life in the wilderness of rural America is determined if somewhat tedious. Despite needing a sense of the history of Sarah's upbringing and the understandably huge shift in familial feeling that takes place; the voyeuristic in me felt impatient to get the crux of the novel - the events that transpired to create an atmosphere conducive to persecuting innocent women and children and claiming them to be witches. Unfortunately, my impatience was rewarded with more banal goings on, which although enlightening, were not gratifying in the end.

Kent does manage to recreate the desperation, dreariness and tedium of being imprisoned. The varying fortunes and misfortunes visited upon the Carrier family whilst imprisoned feel real and uncomfortable to read... such is the power of the plain language used. The end is disappointingly unsatisfying. I expected to discover more than the bare bones about Sarah's father's mysterious past, as well as something that would indeed make sense of the Red Book that Martha Carrier so carefully kept secret.

All vague disappointments aside, The Heretic's Daughter is a tragic tale of a distinctly uncomfortable and unceremoniously wicked time in America's past that will resonate with those who feel that perhaps we, today, are shifted back towards a guilty until proven innocent state.

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