witch trials

Cover reads "Hester: A Novel" and "Laurie Lico Albanese." The words are surrounded by deep pink roses, tiny white flowers, and foliage.

Hester

By Laurie Lico Albanese
Star Rating
★★★★

Rated by Alice Pi
Oct 17, 2022

Witch trials are already a thing of the past in this historical novel set in Salem, Massachusetts during the lifetime of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. Witch trials are over; but their memory lives on in Hawthorne’s nineteenth century, with tensions lingering amongst the old Salem families and Hawthorne himself bearing ancestral guilt over his own great-great-grandfather's role in sentencing accused women to death more than a century earlier.

But Hawthorne is not front and center here. He is upstaged by a new immigrant from Scotland, Isobel Gamble, who becomes his lover