Welcome to the BOOK LOG… It’s a log of books, amongst other things.

WITCH CHILD

I’m reading Witch Child by Celia Rees. It’s another book about a girl with supernatural abilities at peril among those most unpleasant of historical sects, the blood-thirsty, witch-hating, self-righteous, grotesquely intolerant Puritans of Seventeenth Century England. But this story’s a particularly good one, being fast-paced, exciting and with a keen eye for the rancid squalor of past times. It takes its heroine Mary all the way from the lawless country roads of England just after the Civil War, out across the ocean and on to the vast forests of the New World. And always she’s in danger from the cold-eyed Puritan preachers amongst whom she must live, those pious, self-appointed prophets whose word is taken as law. And yet she is not entirely alone. There’s a mysterious presence that seems to be keeping watch over Mary. A strange hare is spotted at the edge of the settlement…