Poetry Review #41

Wicked Girls: A Novel of the Salem Witch Trials

Author: Stephanie Hemphill
Publisher: Balzer + Bray; Reprint, 2010
ASIN: B003MVZ5SQ
Format: eBook
Reading Ages: Teen & Young Adult - 9th grade & up

Genre: Period Historical Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Poetry, Free Verse Novel 

I Gave This Book 4 Roars! 🦁🦁🦁🦁

Why 4 Roars? I had mixed feelings about this book. I loved the writing, the flow and the feeling.  However, I think it became a little too modern for a historical piece written about this time period. 

I can see that the author was trying to establish a connection between contemporary young ladies of the present and those of the past. The slant of the book takes on the plight of young women that have very little control in their own lives. It is almost as if the author took young women from this time period and placed them in the 1600's.  

It might be difficult for many teen readers to get past the thees, thous, and other word choices that they could stumble over in this book. 

Poetic Elements: The poetry works well for the book; it is beautifully written, pushes the reader to consider how young women were treated during the 16oo's, and treats the wild hysteria as an eerie disruptive experience. The poetry is natural, graceful, and fits into this type of experience. 

“Hemphill follows her Printz Honor Book Your Own, Sylvia (2007) with another bold verse novel based on historical figures. Here, her voices belong to the ‘afflicted’ girls of Salem, whose accusations of witchcraft led to the hangings of 19 townspeople in 1692. Once again, Hemphill's raw, intimate poetry probes behind the abstract facts and creates characters that pulse with complex emotion. According to an appended author's note, unresolved theories about the causes of the girls' behavior range from bread-mold-induced hallucinations to bird flu. In Hemphill's story, the girls fake their afflictions, and the book's great strength lies in its masterful unveiling of the girls' wholly believable motivations: romantic jealousy; boredom; a yearning for friendship, affection, and attention; and most of all, empowerment in a highly constricting and stratified society that left few opportunities for women. Layering the girls' voices in interspersed, lyrical poems that slowly build the psychological drama, Hemphill requires patience from her readers. What emerge are richly developed portraits of Puritanical mean girls, and teens will easily recognize the contemporary parallels in the authentic clique dynamics. An excellent supplementary choice for curricular studies of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, this will also find readers outside the classroom, who will savor the accessible, unsettling, piercing lines that connect past and present with timeless conflicts and truths.” ~~Gillian Engberg

Appeal: The appeal is the effortless poetry and the unnerving qualities of the Salem Witch Trials that bleed into the story. 

“In subtle, spare first-person free-verse poems, the author skillfully demonstrates how ordinary people may come to commit monstrous acts. Haunting and still frighteningly relevant.”

~~ Kirkus Reviews

Overall Quality: The author is more than capable of creating emotions with her poetry and this is not her first book written in novel free verse.    

“The expressive writing, masterful tension, and parallels to modern group dynamics create a powerful and relevant page-turner."  ~~ Publishers Weekly

Layout: The layout is in novel arrangement.  

Connections:
Spotlight Poem - 

"Life is not for joy and jolly,

but for toil and test,

an order ordained." 

Sharing - A readers theater performance might work for sharing parts of this work.

Activity - This book would be good for a history project that centered on the topic of religious persecutions in early America.  

Salem Witch Trials