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Colleen is feeling the heat. It's her final year of school, and university applications and deciphering boys' texts have turned life into a pressure cooker. Colleen and her friends are expected to somehow keep it all together - until they can't.
The first victim is gorgeous, popular Clara who starts having loud and uncontrollable tics while her horrified classmates look on. More students follow suit with new symptoms: seizures, body vibrations, violent coughing fits, and hair loss. The media descends as school officials, angry parents and health experts scramble to find something, or someone, to blame. But there is one thing no one has factored in: the school's town was once Salem Village, the site of a similarly bizarre epidemic among teenage girls three hundred years earlier - and it seems history is about to repeat itself.
About the author
Katherine Howe is the author of the #2 New York Times bestseller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, as well as The House of Velvet and Glass. She is widely considered an expert on American colonial life and the Salem Witch Trials, having written both as an academic and a novelist on the subject. She is the author of The Penguin Book of Pirates (forthcoming, Feb 2024). Katherine lives and sails in New England with her family
Report
'Perhaps the best thing about the book is its tense, paranoid atmosphere; the way it evokes the everyday pressure of being an ambitious, emotionally vulnerable teen, while simultaneously showing just how easily this pressure can twist into something monstrous.'
Telegraph, Best YA Books 2015
