England, 1649. A sadistic witch hunter. An apprentice healer accused of witchcraft. Can she escape the hangman’s noose?
England, 1650. A sadistic witch hunter. An innocent healer and her child accused of witchcraft. Can they escape the hangman’s noose?
In the first book, Widdershins the story starts from
the very beginning of Jane Chandler and John Sharpe’s lives. They both tell
their stories in alternating chapters throughout both books. Their childhoods
couldn’t be more different, Jane’s, is one filled with a loving family and
friends, with time spent in nature and with the local community. Her mother a
local wise woman helps cure ailments and deliver babies, Jane learns all she
can and continues her mother’s work. John Sharpe’s life was very different,
filled with beatings and verbal abuse. His mother died in childbirth and his
father blames John and the local wise woman who delivered him. When John later
lives with his uncle, a very religious man, he witnesses a witch trial and
becomes obsessed with the idea of becoming a witch-finder and killing as many
witches as he can, in god’s name. Jane and John don’t meet until near the end
of Widdershins, and we are left on a cliff-hanger with the story picking up again
in Sunwise. The series ends in a brutal twist that I didn’t expect.
Running parallel to this story is Jane and Tom’s heart-breaking love story,
which I really enjoyed.
I have never hated a novel’s villain as much as I hated John
Sharpe. It’s easy to simply dismiss him as being born pure evil, but he is a
lot more complex than that, much of his character and actions stem from learnt
behaviour and abuse, illness of the mind and body, as well as a real hatred of
women. It is both fascinating and disturbing to read the chapters that are told
from his point of view, and the way he justifies his gruesome actions to
himself. As Sunwise nears its end, John is held firmly within the grip
of psychosis, which leads to the books dramatic and shocking conclusion. The
novel is inspired by the Newcastle witch trials in 1650, when fifteen/sixteen
people were executed on the same day, after Scottish witch-finder John Wheeler
rounded up people from the streets of Newcastle and put them on trial. Although
John is based on a real man, the majority of his story in this series is
fictious. However, the methods, torture, and humiliation that the author
mentions in the story, really did happen to women and men accused of
witchcraft. Witch-finders would often earn money per witch found guilty, and so
used trickery in their investigations to make it look like the accused was
guilty, so that they could earn more money. Many innocent women and men lost their
lives to the hysteria that the witch-finders caused.
A great deal of research clearly went into writing this
book, and it really shows and adds to the story. neither book shied away from
gory details, and at times it was uncomfortable to read, but this was absolutely
necessary to the character’s stories. Although the author’s note at the end of
Sunwise tells us there will be no further books in this series, I can’t help
but hold out hope that there may be a story about Rose one day, I would love to
know what happened after the end of the story. I was completely hooked by both
of these books. I couldn’t put them down, I had to know what happened and there
were some fantastic twists. Highly recommended!
Story trigger warnings include: Violence and sexual violence against women, mental illness, and infant death. There are also some gory parts, if you’re not a fan of that!
Thanks for the blog tour support x
ReplyDeleteThank you for inviting me on the tour, Anne!
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