Cover of Conversion

Conversion

by Katherine Howe

3.2
(22 ratings)
402 pages5 editions2001Dreamscape MediaISBN 9781629237664

About this book

“Howe is a formidable researcher and writer, and this creepy, gripping novel is intimately layered, shedding light on the challenges teenage girls have faced throughout history.”—The New York Times Book Review A chilling mystery based on true events, from New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. 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?

Publication Details

Publisher
Dreamscape Media
Published
2001
Pages
402
ISBN
9781629237664
Language
en
Editions
5

About Katherine Howe

Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning writer of historical fiction. Her adult novels are The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2009 and was named one of USA Today’s top tend books of the year, and The House of Velvet and Glass, which was a USA Today bestseller in 2011. For young adults, Katherine has written Conversion, which received the 2015 Massachusetts Book Award in young adult literature, and a New York City-based literary ghost story called The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen, which was named a 2016 “Must Read” for young adults by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. In 2014 she edited The Penguin Book of Witches for Penguin Classics, a primary source reader on the history of witchcraft in England and North America which made a regional bestseller list and which has been translated into Spanish. The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, her new novel for adults, will be published by Henry Holt and Co in summer 2019. She has appeared on “Good Morning America,” “CBS This Morning,” NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” the BBC, and the History Channel, and she hosted “Salem: Unmasking the Devil” for National Geographic. Her fiction has been translated into over twenty languages. In 2015 she was the visiting writer in residence at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, and she spent 2016 as a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. She holds a BA in art history and philosophy from Columbia and an MA in American and New England studies from Boston University, and she has taught American history, visual culture, and writing at BU and Cornell. Her first published works were three brief catalogue essays in an architectural monograph published by the Museum of Modern Art in 2000. A native Houstonian, she lives in New England and New York City with her family, where she is at work on her next novel. ([source][1]) [1]: https://www.katheri

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