Wicked Girls

by Stephanie Hemphill

[Angie]

The Salem Witch Trials is a strange time in American History, but it’s one that I find utterly fascinating and would love to learn more about. Wicked Girls is focused on three young girls who became the most prolific accusers at the time, even if their claims were not set entirely in truth. This is a fictionalized account of real events, and I thought the verse format was a good choice for it. Often times historical fiction–especially those written on real events–tend to be slow and sometimes feel drawn out. This was definitely not the case for Wicked Girls, which covers a year of the trials. It starts out innocently enough with a few girls playing at telling each others fortunes. Then a death symbol appears and two of the girls become “afflicted.” In a time when fits were often associated with the devil, the girls are quick to point at an Invisible World where witches are tormenting them.

Once the first stone is cast, the girls cannot stop for fear of being called liars and losing their new found status. They essentially become an elite clique, almost like the Gossip Girl of the late 1600s. The villagers look up to them to identify the witches, but they also fear being wrongly accused by them. I think the author did a great job showing how clique behavior was very much present in the 17th century despite being typically thought of as a modern day occurrence. Like any clique, the girls eventually start to turn on each other or want to leave the group. This is the only aspect of Wicked Girls that I wish had been explored more or even exaggerated a bit. They held an awful lot of power during the trials, so I thought it would have been a great twist if one of the girls had called out one of their own as a witch. However, it seems like the author stuck pretty closely to the true story, which is fine, but I would have liked a little more out of it in the end.

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