The Merrybegot by Julie Hearn and I, Corriander by Sally Gardner

Seventeenth Century midwifery and old magic. Hallucinogenic powders and piskies in the hedgerows. Fake demonic possession and a real visit to the realm of the fairy, deep within a magical hill. In The Merrybegot Julie Hearn treads the line dividing earthy, physical realities from wild fantasy, and is more than happy to leap back and forth across it. The vividly-drawn characters and urgent plotline make this a gripping read, particularly when the witch hunt is gathering its horrible momentum. There’s a twist in its tail too, as the counterplot snakes its way to the New World, and finally to Salem, famous for its witch trails.
In I, Coriander by Sally Gardner, the worlds of Fairy and of England in the mid-seventeenth century again provide the parallel settings for the story. Coriander finds herself struggling against oppression and fighting for her life in both of these worlds. As in The Merrybegot, Puritanism and religious extremism are shown as hypercritical and self-serving creeds, taken up by corrupt characters burning with a lust for power. While The Julie Hearn uses folklore and spell-craft as source material, Jane Gardiner makes good use of some dark fairy tales. The distracted, grieving father and the wicked stepmother are familiar from Cinderella and related tales and are fleshed out in unflinching detail here. The notion of the fairy bride is another traditional motif, and is found in the Arthurian legends and elsewhere. There is a hard, glittering quality to the fairy world as described by Gardiner, a cold, cruel beauty that lends the book an enjoyably unsettling atmosphere. By contrast, but just as effective, Julie Hearn’s piskies are portrayed as ditch-dwelling creatures who bite the ankles of unwary humans and show their contempt for all and sundry by baring their dirt-encrusted buttocks at passers-by!
Both these books are well worth a read, and could be seen to have laid the ground rules for a new sub-sub-genre within children’s fiction - fantasy stories with a Seventeenth Century English historical setting.