Conversion

Starred review from April 28, 2014
As she did in her adult novel The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Howe draws thrilling connections between the Salem witch trials and the present day in her YA debut. Colleen Rowley and her friends attend St. Joan’s Academy, a private Catholic high school in Boston that caters to girls with Harvard-size aspirations. After Colleen’s classmate Clara has a strange seizure during class, Clara develops shocking, Tourette’s-like verbal and facial tics. The condition soon spreads through the school until there are dozens of girls with inexplicable and divergent symptoms—Colleen’s friend Anjali has started coughing up pins. The school nurse and local medical professionals scroll futilely through diagnoses, and the media descends on St. Joan’s, making life a circus for the girls and their families. Howe gives Colleen a strong and sure voice, while alternating between the present-day action in 2012 and “Interludes” set in Salem Village in 1706. A chilling guessing game of a novel that will leave readers thinking about the power (and powerlessness) of young women in the past and present alike. Ages 12–up. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, William Morris Endeavor.

June 1, 2014
Fingers are pointed and chaos ensues when a group of high-achieving high school seniors begin exhibiting bizarre behaviors in an all-girls private school located in Danvers, Massachusetts-formerly known as Salem Village.After queen bee Clara Rutherford falls into a seizure at St. Joan's, and her best friends are similarly afflicted, fellow student Colleen Rowley receives anonymous texts that urge her to study Arthur Miller's The Crucible for clues. More girls fall victim to the seizures, and reporters and environmental crusaders descend on Danvers. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health finally declares that the girls are suffering from "conversion disorder," an illness in which the body "converts" stress into physical symptoms. But after seeing how one of her friends seemed to disperse her sadness over a doomed love affair into other people, Colleen wonders if supernatural powers may be at play. In parallel chapters, Ann Putnam, a primary figure in the actual Salem witch trials, confesses to her local minister that she and the other accusers were lying when they named people as witches. The richly drawn characters and period language of the familiar Salem story are far more compelling than the stereotypically rendered Danvers teens. After a deliberate buildup of escalating tension and suspense in the contemporary narrative, Howe hastily wraps up the story based on actual events that took place in La Roy, New York, in 2012 with a series of unsatisfactory solutions that are dropped on the reader with little or no ceremony.Slow boil, flat finish. (author's note) (Fiction. 13-18)

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June 1, 2014

Gr 9 Up-Howe skillfully blends a modern medical mystery based on real events with the historical Salem Witch panic to create an engaging story. The prelude begins with Ann Putnam arriving at her minister's house in Salem, Massachusetts in 1706, finally ready to confess her part in the Panic more than 12 years before. Ann's tale continues in between glimpses into the life of Colleen Rowley, a senior at the exclusive St. Joan's High School of Danvers, Massachusetts in 2012. The pressure in the final semester is intense for Colleen and her classmates, who are all competing for places in top colleges. Her usually uneventful morning is disturbed, first by an apparent seizure of the very popular Clara Rutherford, and then by the unexplained replacement of the young AP History teacher. As the semester continues, more girls fall victim to a panoply of symptoms. Meanwhile, Colleen begins work on a research paper for the history substitute on an actual person absent from Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Amid a growing media circus, diagnoses are offered and then dismissed. The protagonist's research persuades her that the cause of the Salem Witch trials was far from supernatural and that the same "force" might be at work at St. Joan's. The author convincingly writes in the voice of current and historical teens, and major characters undergo significant growth in this intense tale. Howe's use of red herrings and the "ripped from the headlines" narrative will keep readers guessing until the final reveal.-Eric Norton, McMillan Memorial Library, Wisconsin Rapids

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2014
Grades 8-11 St. Joan's Academy in Danvers, Massachusetts, a well-to-do private girl's school for the best and brightest, is usually only home to hysteria of the college-admissions kind. But when Clara starts convulsing in class, a media frenzy fixates on the St. Joan's mystery disease. Is it a reaction to the HPV vaccine? Or are students under so much pressure they're beginning to crack? As more and more girls fall ill, Coleen, gunning for valedictorian, researches the Salem witch trials and begins to notice eerie echoes among her peers. Howe, author of the New York Times best-selling The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009), returns to similar territory here in her young-adult debut. In propulsive scenes, the story alternates between Coleen in 2012, who narrates the growing atmosphere of intense competition and pressure that is thankfully tempered by some heartening and realistic friendships, and Ann Putnam in 1706, who recounts her complicity during the Salem Panic and comes clean about the girls' accusations of witchcraft. A simmering blend of relatable high-school drama with a persistent pinprick of unearthliness in the background. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With a major motion picture in development, this novel is getting a media campaign to match.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)