Wicked Girls

The Bibliography
Hemphill, Stephanie. 2010. Wicked Girls. New York. Balzer + Bray. ISBN 0061853289

The Plot
Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Margeret Walcott and four other girls from Salem Village claim to be afflicted by witches. After pinches, fits and seizures, the girls point out those who have done them or their families wrong in the past and brand them witches, sending them to the gallows. Before they realize their faults and start telling the truth, 19 innocent people are hanged.

The Analysis
This book, to me, wasn't a book of poetry, but instead it was just short snippets into the fictionalized lives of three girls during the Salem Witch trials. I refused to read it as poetry. The not-poems aren't frilly or lofty like a lot of poems are, and they definitely didn't rhyme. Reading the book made me think of crime shows like Forensic Files where you know what is going to happen from the beginning, but now you're getting to look inside and behind the scenes to see what made the crazy killers do what they did.

The Review
(Marla K. Unruh (VOYA, October 2010 (Vol. 33, No. 4))
Salem Village in the 1690s is a place where fortune telling is shunned in horror, yet twelve-year-old Ann Putnam and her friends play at predicting who they will marry by seeing what shapes egg whites take floating in water. When they see the shape of a coffin, Margaret Walcott, seventeen, fears they have “let loose a thing what leads to the grave.” Indeed, seven girls find themselves on a path that leads nineteen people to the grave. Betty Parrish and Abigail Williams apparently suffer a convulsive fit and are thought to be “afflicted” by the devil because they can see the “invisible world.” Soon the other girls join the ranks and are elevated to the status of seers in the village. Experiencing a heady, unaccustomed sense of power, they claim to see who is afflicting them and accuse other villagers of being witches. Their elders then hold trials, condemning to death those accused. This carefully researched and beautifully written poetic novel infuses new life and relevance into a dark episode in our history. Each character is limned in a distinctive voice and personality, and the girls’ thoughts and words reveal the pressures that drive them. Their harsh lives contrast with the still-unspoiled loveliness of the early New England setting. Told with a piercing intensity and exquisite sensory detail, this story will haunt the reader long after the book is laid aside.

The Connection
It would be an interesting teen program to do a readers' theatre with this book. The beginning of the book has a cast of "characters" and each poem has the "character" listed along with the title, so it would be easy to have each participant select a character that they'd like to be, then read the poems aloud and maybe in costume! After performing the readers' theatre, participants could then watch a documentary of the Salem Witch Trials, like Witch Hunt, if the library holding the event was legally allowed to show movies, of course.