Claustrophobic Manningtree is abuzz with the arrival of Matthew Hopkins, a mysterious, moneyed gentleman from Suffolk who later becomes the self-styled “Witchfinder General.” In lust with clerk John Edes, Rebecca barely notices Hopkins, but then a local boy becomes inexplicably ill, and the cause is determined to be “bewitchment,” with Rebecca’s mother fingered as a guilty party. The book opens with 19-year-old Rebecca West’s tour-de-force description of her heavily snoring mother, the vulgar but undeniably formidable Beldam (a name, Rebecca notes, that “suits her, because it sounds wide and wicked”). The inventive, sharp-witted debut from poet Blakemore ( Humbert Summer) draws on the Puritan witch trials of Civil War England, when several women were executed for witchcraft in 1645 Manningtree.
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