How to Hang A Witch by Adriana Mather; Alfred A. Knopf; © 2016; ISBN 978055-3539479; 358 pages including author’s notes; $17.99
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Adriana Mather is the author and Samantha Mather is the fictional protagonist of this mystery-romance-supernatural novel for young adults that draws upon the Salem Witch Trials for its plot.
Adriana is a 12th generation member of the Mather family that came to America when the colony in which they lived was still known as Massachusetts Bay.. In the 3rd generation of that family was Cotton Mather, Puritan preacher, political leader, son of Harvard College president Increase Mather, and a key advocate in his writings and pulpit pronouncements for trying and convicting men and women believed to be practicing witchcraft.
In the novel, Samantha Mather—who we are tempted to think of as Adriana’s alter-ego — moves with her stepmother to Salem to live in her late grandmother’s home—the home to which Samantha’s father, who is comatose in a New York Hospital, refused to revisit during Samantha’s lifetime. She is now a high school student, and she becomes an immediate target for bullying by black clad “Descendants” of the families whose members were put to death as a result of the infamous witch trials.
In other words, some nine generations later, the descendants of the witches and warlocks are the persecutors, and Samantha, as a descendant of Cotton Mather, suffers the hurt and humiliation of unreasoning discrimination in a historical reversal of fortune.
Being bullied because of the family you were born into is a theme that we Jewish readers can relate to, even though there is nary another Jewish angle or reference in this well-written book – except for someone one day serving challah among other baked goods.
For a school assignment, Samantha and a neighbor boy, Jaxon, are supposed to research the history of the place where the witches were executed, which Samantha—who encounters a young ghost named Elijah—learns may not be the place that town historians have always believed it to be.
Readers will enjoy watching Samantha deal with the bullies, go questing for the real location of the witches’ hanging, and find herself romantically drawn not only to the living Jaxon but also to the very debonair, but dead, Elijah.
Adriana Mather, the author, deserves compliments on this first novel. Although I thought her portrait of Samantha’s physical clumsiness was a little over the top, the overall plot is intriguing and Adriana’s writing carries the reader quickly from one chapter to another.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com. Comments intended for publication in the space below MUST be accompanied by the letter writer’s first and last name and by his/ her city and state of residence (city and country for those outside the United States.)