Is anyone else fascinated with the Salem Witchtrials?  I just can’t get enough of reading about that time period.  It is so interesting to me – the people, the politics of what was happening, the theories about why everything happened…Maybe I lived during this time in a past life; maybe I was even a witch.  Hmmm…

Anyway, here is a list of some of my favorite books about the Witchtrials:

One of my favorites is a play by Arthur Miller called The Crucible.  The setting is the Witchtrials of the 1890s, but is also about the 1950s McCarthy era.  The story really gets at the heart of why the trials happened.

I also liked The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent.  Martha Carrier is the first who was accused of witchcraft, and this story focuses on her and the escalating hysteria of the time.

Another good one is Wicked Girls by Stephanie Hemphill.  This is a novel in verse (poetry) about the witchtrials.  The story is fiction, but told from the perspectives of three characters who were real people of the time, and brings in many components of the trials.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe is also great.  This book connects past and present through one character who is doing research and finds she has more ties to Salem and the trials than she could have imagined.

And one I am reading right now: Conversion by Katherine Howe.  I just started this book, but it is set in the present, at a private girls’ school.  One of the girls has started to have seizures, and no one knows what is going on…and that’s as far as I am.

I thought this would be a good list since Halloween is coming soon…stay away from moldy rye bread and you might avoid the hysteria.