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The Minister’s Daughter
By Julie Hearn
Atheneum, 2005. 263 pages.
The Sacrifice
By Kathleen Benner Duble
Margaret K. McElderry Books, Simon and Schuster, 2005. 211 pages.
I find books such as Julie Hearn’s The Minister’s Daughter to be nearly irresistible, and for good reason: strong conflict, characters who are worth knowing and characters who bring out one’s best righteous indignation, magical realism that you can sink your teeth into, and social consciousness that speaks to our day and to the novel’s historical period all combine for a reading experience that satisfies on multiple levels.
Set in 1645 in an English village, the main character here is Nell, a “merrybegot” — she was conceived on the first day of May and is therefore sacred to God. She lives with her grandmother, the village’s “cunning woman,” and is her grandmother’s apprentice as midwife and healer. Theirs is a rural world that is as much in touch with fairies, piskies, and the nature-centered rituals that pre-date the coming of Christianity as it is with the English and Puritan power structures that have encroached upon it. This is a world in which conflict will arise quickly and seriously, where the powerless sometimes face dire consequences that can stem from something as little as a misunderstanding. Nell comes of age as a practitioner of the “old ways” at a time that the “new ways” of Christianity are coming to the fore, and it is a dangerous time indeed.
Into this picture come Grace and Patience Madden, the daughters of the new minister. Motherless and isolated, Grace and Patience have no real connection to the community in which their father ministers. Hearn makes the environment in which they are growing up crystal clear:
This new minister, though, come recently from a neighboring county, is a right miserable bogger. A Puritan with strict ideas on how the villagers should conduct themselves, and no lenity in him toward any who frolic out of wedlock (or even in it, it sometimes seems); get drunk on the Sabbath (or any other day of the week, come to that); and dabble in Catholicism or the old pagan rituals.
And when the effects of natural curiosity, passion, and teenage hormones come to bear upon Grace, she chooses to take advantage of the divide between the folk ways and the Christian ways to place blame upon Nell, fingering her as a witch (at the height of the English witch craze, which preceded the Salem, Massachusetts craze by several decades). The main story is paralleled by “The Confession of Patience Madden”: relocated to Salem in 1692, Patience is faced with a false accusation of her own and must tell the truth about the events of 1645 in an attempt to escape the hangman’s noose.
It will not do to say too much about the plot twists and turns that will keep you turning the pages to the end of this fine story. I would rather you read the book for yourself and become steeped in the world that Hearn imagines and creates for us. But remember, as her narrator points out through rhetorical questions:
Who’s to say what the difference is between a love potion concocted with kindness on a waxing moon and a blood pudding mixed in anger on a filthy winter’s morning? Who’s to say what has an effect? What is magical, what isn’t, and why?
Who truly understands?
Written for a slightly younger audience than The Minister’s Daughter, Kathleen Duble’s The Sacrifice is another story connected to the witch hunts of 1692 in Salem, and it is based on actual events in the lives of Duble’s ancestors in Andover, Massachusetts (the story of how Duble discovered these events is a good read in itself).
In this story, ten-year-old Abigail Faulkner is witness to the tragic lies that lead many to the gallows and many more to the jails. Despite the fact that her grandfather, one of the local ministers, tries to inject a dose of reason into the vein of superstition and fear that spreads from Salem and takes over Andover, the ball, once rolling, is nearly impossible to stop. Abigail and her sister are eventually among the accused and are carted off to prison in Salem. Duble’s scenes inside the jail are downright Dickensian, giving the reader a front-row view of the squalor and desperation that have likely always marked the prisons of those held without due process. Eventually, Abigail’s mother comes up with a plan whereby Abby and her sister will be released. Whether the plan succeeds, and whether it serves to further the madness or help bring it to an end, I will leave for the reader to discover.
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is probably the gold standard for drawing lessons for today from the events of the witch hunts. Both The Minister’s Daughter and The Sacrifice tap into this tradition in a way that will both entertain and enlighten young readers. The battle for ideological dominance (a.k.a. “culture wars”) that goes on today every time a politician, pundit, or parson opens his or her mouth is ripe for critique, and both of these stories are loaded with parallels that would make Miller proud.
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