A bestselling author, and Prep and The Crucible are mentioned in the blurb…this sounds too good to be true. It was!
Our setting for this novel is St Joan’s Academy in Danvers, Massachusetts, which is a high-achieving school. The girls who attend this exclusive educational establishment set their sights high, none more so than our narrator Colleen Rowley. Unfortunately, for a novel which was meant to be set in a modern high school the characterisation was a let-down. There was a very old-fashioned feel to the characters, even though they were talking about topical things, and the narrator was someone whose voice never quite rang true. Her self-proclaimed superiority irritated me, particularly because she spent so much of the novel being very smug (even when she didn’t have any right to be).
One day Clara Rutherford, one of the most popular girls in the school, has a fit that results in uncontrollable tics. This strange event is swiftly followed by a number of other girls falling ill. Local and national press are quick to follow this story – determined to find out what is causing these privileged and high-achieving girls to succumb to these mysterious ailments.
Sound familiar? It should, and the fact that the setting of this novel happens to have been known as Salem in the past gives a really obvious pointer as to where the writer is heading. Or so I thought.
We do get the character of Ann, a young girl caught up in the events of Salem, telling us about what happened and offering her account of the hysteria surrounding the witch trials. I was expecting (hoping) that Howe would blend these ideas and use the similarities between the events to make a comment on modern society and its obsession with achievement. Instead, we got two seemingly separate stories and they remained that way.
Perhaps if I’d expected less from this I’d have been more impressed, but it felt like a very good idea that didn’t quite work out.