Welcome to The Friday 56 hosted by Freda’s Voice.
This is a really fun meme!
The only rules are to grab a book (any book), turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader and find a sentence or a few (no spoilers) that grabs you and post it.
Then go over to Freda’s Voice and leave your link so we can visit your 56!
My 56 for this week is from:
One Of Windsor
The Untold Story of America’s First Witch Hanging
by Beth M. Caruso
Genre: Historical Fiction
From Page 56 in the paperback.
It was a frontier like no other Alice had imagined.
As native people came into Boston to bring furs to traders that filled the returning ships, Alice looked on, mesmerized. Bronzed Indian men wearing buckskins and moccasins for attire, with adornments of feathers and strings of wampum, seemed exotic to her. She could not help but find them beautiful.
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Read on if you want to know more.
Synopsis
Alice, a young woman prone to intuitive insights and loyalty to the only family she has ever known, leaves England for the rigid colony of the Massachusetts Bay in 1635 in hopes of reuniting with them again. Finally settling in Windsor, Connecticut, she encounters the rich American wilderness and its inhabitants, her own healing abilities, and the blinding fears of Puritan leaders which collide and set the stage for America’s first witch hanging, her own, on May 26, 1647. This event and Alice’s ties to her beloved family are catalysts that influence Connecticut’s Governor John Winthrop Jr. to halt witchcraft hangings in much later years. Paradoxically, these same ties and the memory of the incidents that led to her accusation become a secret and destructive force behind Cotton Mather’s written commentary on the Salem witch trials of 1692, provoking further witchcraft hysteria in Massachusetts forty-five years after her death. The author uses extensive historical research combined with literary inventions, to bring forth a shocking and passionate narrative theory explaining this tragic and important episode in American history.
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Leave your link and I’ll drop by your 56.
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