Book Review: Conversion a.k.a. the best book you will ever read...

Just finished the 2nd book for the NHS Book Club!  My 5 teens picked out pretty much every book this year, and I think this one, specifically, was a request by one of them.

Conversion

by Katherine Howe

Colleen is an ambitious, driven, and intelligent senior at St. Joan's Academy, a private girls' school in Massachusetts. It's important the her and her friends and classmates keep it together as they prepare to graduate and go to college--until it falls apart.

At first, it's only Clara, who falls out of her seat in class having seizures that leave her with a debilitating tic and speech impediment.  Then another girl loses all her hair, a star athlete loses the ability of her legs, and the snowball has turned into the size of a boulder.

The media, the family, the school, and the girls rush to find the cause of these afflictions--pollution, stress, witchcraft? Set in the town of Danvers, the original site of the Salem Witch Trials, the past becomes present and Colleen must solve the puzzle and any connection to Salem and the popular play The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

This book is nuts! I mean, in a completely good, wanna rip your hair out to find out the answers, but you can't because it's 400 pages and you HAVE to figure it out on your own with cheating, kind of way.  This may be the first book in years where I ended up doing extra research because it was so interesting.  The connection to the Salem Witch Trials and The Crucible were an immediate attraction to this story.

When I looked up the book on Howe's website, there was a link to a REAL case similar to this from 2012 (Find it here: LeRoy Mystery Illness). There were a few girls in this town that developed tics and stutters, but no one could figure out the cause.  This is the stuff that keeps me so intrigued, because there HAS to be an answer somewhere, but do we turn to science? or paranormal phenomena, such as witchcraft?

I think readers of this story will be thrown all over the place trying to make sense of everything--and because of that, I think it might be the best book they ever read.

THANK YOU NHS book club for suggesting we read this one! And thanks to Kaeley for bringing it to my attention last year!

Here is the video explaining the real account in Le Roy from 2012: