Title: Conversion
Author: Katherine Howe
Format: Paperback ARC
Pub. Date: July 1st 2014
Source: Won
Book Description:
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane comes a chilling mystery—Prep meets The Crucible.
It’s senior year at St. Joan’s Academy, and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together. Until they can’t.
First it’s the school’s queen bee, Clara Rutherford, who suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Her mystery illness quickly spreads to her closest clique of friends, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumor; rumor blossoms into full-blown panic.
Soon the media descends on Danvers, Massachusetts, as everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Or are the girls faking? Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . .
Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell. With her signature wit and passion, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what’s really happening to the girls at St. Joan’s?
Review:
★
I had such high hopes for this one. I love American history, and have special interest in Salem. I have an entire shelf dedicated to books- both fiction and nonfiction- on the subject. So when a retelling young adult book caught my eye, I was so excited. Boy, what a let down.
The main character was the absolute worst. She's demeaning and shallow and so self obsessed it's ridiculous. If she's supposed to be relatable, then I don't want to meet the girl who sees herself in Colleen. Every word that left her mouth was either snotty, judgmental, or about herself. I couldn't take it for long. The more she talked the less I cared about her and the book.
And the other characters, as well as the plot, are so bland that I can't tell you anything about them. Other than it was set in a prep school, and there's your sterotypical "preppy girls" who show up in every other book that involves a private school in the young adult genre. There's some Salem outlines and references, but it wasn't chilling, or haunting, or anything else that I expected upon reading the blurb.
I don't recommend it. Props on the cover art though. It caught my eye and I really like the design of it.
Maybe if you went to a school like this, with people like this, you'll relate to it more than I did.
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