โHowe 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.โโThe 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.
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Itโs senior year at St. Joanโs Academy, and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boysโ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together. Until they canโt.
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First itโs the schoolโs 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. Joanโs buzzes with rumor; rumor blossoms into full-blown panic.
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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 Colleenโwhoโs been reading The Crucible for extra creditโcomes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries agoย .ย .ย .
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Inspired by true eventsโfrom seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high schoolโConversion 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, whatโs really happening to the girls at St. Joanโs?