The Witching Tide | Margaret Meyer

It was clear I was going to read this book when the NYT named it the best historical fiction novel of 2023 and compared it favorable to The Scarlet Letter (classic, but not my favorite) and Hamnet (love everything that Maggie O'Farrell writes). The story is based on a two-year period when a literal witch hunt took over East Anglia, England in the mid-1600s. In real life, about 100 women were killed after being accused of witchcraft. In the novel, the action is compressed to a few weeks or months, and I think the story suffers for it. The main character, Martha, is mute. As a woman who serves as a midwife in the community and who practices herbal medicine, she is suspected but not accused until the very end of the book. Her efforts to defend her family and friends is muted by her inability to communicate.

The story line is a bit convoluted and the ending feels a bit thrown together. The compressed timeline makes the narrative feel unreasonable, even for something as completely unreasonable as a witch hunt, both for the imprisonment and hanging of several women and the departure of the outside agitator, the Witch-Man, who drops in and creates chaos. Reading about this being in England was interesting since most of the witch trial stories we read are based on the American version, the Salem Witch Trials. The connection to modern-day issues can be a bit heavy-handed at times, but there's no question, to me at least, that the comparison is worth drawing.

This one definitely falls into the "ok but not great" category.