A chilling mystery based on true events, from New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.
It’s senior year at St. Joan’s Academy, and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together. Until they can’t.
First it’s the school’s queen bee, Clara Rutherford, who suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Her mystery illness quickly spreads to her closest clique of friends, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumor; rumor blossoms into full-blown panic.
Soon the media descends on Danvers, Massachusetts, as everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Or are the girls faking? Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . .
Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell. With her signature wit and passion, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what’s really happening to the girls at St. Joan’s?
Author
Katherine Howe
Katherine Howe is a bestselling and award-winning historian and novelist who is a direct descendant of a nineteenth-century sailor who battled pirates on the high seas as well as three women who were tried for witchcraft in Salem. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of Pirates and The Penguin Book of Witches; the author of the novels A True Account: Hannah Masury’s Sojourn Amongst the Pyrates, Written by Herself and The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, the New York Times bestselling novels The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and The House of Velvet and Glass, and the young adult novels Conversion and The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen; and the coauthor with Anderson Cooper of the New York Times bestsellers Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty and Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune. A native Houstonian, she lives and sails with her family in New England.
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