The Heretic's Daughter

[justcarol67]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "potioncat" <willsonkmom at ...> wrote:
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> > Sorry, Potioncat! My distant cousin (ninth cousin once removed?) beat me to the punch in writing this novel.
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> > Carol, who almost forgot to say that the novel is "The Heretic's Daughter" by Kathleen Kent
> >
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> Potioncat:
> I didn't get very far into it, but maybe I'll give it another try.
> And just because there's one novel about Martha Carrier, doesn't mean you can't write one too!
>
Carol:
Thanks, PC. I certainly wouldn't write it from Sarah's point of view given that she was really not quite eight when she "testified" against her mother, who supposedly appeared to her as a black cat and carried her in spirit so that she could torment another little girl. (Poor little thing! Who put those strange ideas into her head?)

It does start slowly (but so does LOTR, my favorite book of all time) and it does have some stylistic flaws (but so does "The Sunne in Splendour," my favorite historical novel ever) and it does have some important factual errors (primarily the ages of the two youngest children), but the later chapters moved me to tears.

Some day when I get out from under my editing projects and have the money to travel to Massachusetts to examine the historical records, maybe I'll write that novel--or a nonfiction biography if there's enough information. I suppose that I could make it a saga--various ancestors from the Mayflower through Salem to the Revolutionary War. The Puritan poet and preacher Michael Wigglesworth, one of whose poems is called "Day of Doom," is also my ancestor. What a contrast!

Carol, who thinks that JKR would admire Martha Carrier, the most courageous of the Salem "witches" and the only one to maintain her innocence without wavering from her arrest to her death