3.0
The Last Witchfinder
ByPublisher Description
. Jennet Stearne's father hangs witches for a living. But when she witnesses the unjust execution of her beloved aunt Isobel, the precocious child decides to make it her life's mission to bring down the Parliamentary Witchcraft Act.
Armed with little save the power of reason, and determined to see justice prevail, Jennet hurls herself into a series of picaresque adventures—traveling from King William's Britain to the fledgling American Colonies to an uncharted island in the Caribbean, braving West Indies pirates, Algonquin Indian captors, the machinations of the Salem Witch Court, and the sensuous love of a young Ben Franklin. For Jennet cannot and must not rest until she has put the last witchfinder out of business.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Last Witchfinder Reviews
3.0
DarkSunSeverian
Created 4 months agoShare
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Son Nguyen
Created 10 months agoShare
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Melanie Downes
Created almost 3 years agoShare
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“Not good at all! It was mostly about the History of how they discover witches and very gruesome I had to put it down”
Avery
Created almost 3 years agoShare
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Scout's Honour
Created over 5 years agoShare
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““Show me an accomplished reader, and I shall show you a person of many virtues, thoughtful and articulate, contemplative though rarely passive, temperate yet benignly ambitious” - James Morrow (p. 212).
Strong women, an incredible adventure and a writing style I’ve never experienced before - three things which I love to see in my books, so why did James Morrow’s historical novel, “The Last Witchfinder”, leave me feeling somewhat bored?
Let’s start with the positives – “The Last Witchfinder” is, from the offset, a story illustrating the strength of women across the globe from an array of cultures, one of which – Jennet Stearne – is fighting a very noble cause: the abolishment of witch-hunting in Britain. She’s incredibly well-educated by her Aunt Isabel from a young age and has the courage to set out on a journey to London to try and find proof that her Aunt is no witch. Such a journey would be just the start for Jennet, as she ventures across the world, often willingly, once as a captive, in order to disproof the existence of witches, whilst maintaining a strong, religious belief. Overall, Jennet is a fantastic literary role model.
Moreover, the structure of the novel is incredibly interesting, and something I found added to the beauty of the narrative. Morrow has structured his sentences at least twice per chapter similar to an egg-timer – one sentences flows like sand into the next, as the gripping scenes involving Jennet and her acquaintances flow into a background narrative, told from the perspective of “The Principia Mathematica”. It gives one the sense that time is running out not only for these women, but also for the truth about witch-hunting and how deeply-rooted it was in misogynism.
It’s interesting how Morrow has connected real-life figures, in particular Benjamin Franklin, and filled in the gaps in their lives with these fictional characters; he’s effectively taken history and given it more colour, if you like. This isn’t something I’m always a fan of – you hear the phrase “you can’t change history” a lot these days, and I’m always wary when reading novels like this of not being drawn in by the fiction mingled with fact. However, I believe that Morrow has chosen the right gaps in history to play with and has created many gripping possibilities in the life of Benjamin Franklin.
So why the boredom? Well Morrow’s novel isn’t just a historical novel, it’s an adventure novel, which I often find, yes, unbelievable, but also childish. Stearne and Franklin’s journey to a desert island after their boat capsizes was an interesting way of filling in Franklin’s history but seemed an irrelevant part of the story. To me, I don’t feel as if the protagonist gained much from this pitstop in her quest to abolish witch-hunting. Furthermore, a lot of the scientific jargon in the novel is really hard to follow and understand. I’m no scientist, so I often skimmed over the Latin phrases or the scientific explanations, as neither would make sense to me. Obviously, to a different reader, they’d have a different meaning entirely, but for me, it didn’t work.
So overall – 3/5 stars. Not terrible at all – a book with a great protagonist and interesting history. But not a book I’d recommend. Bordering on childish and fanciful, “The Last Witchfinder” just didn’t thrill me as much as I’d expected.”
About James Morrow
Born in 1947, James Morrow has been writing fiction ever since he, as a seven-year-old living in the Philadelphia suburbs, dictated “The Story of the Dog Family” to his mother, who dutifully typed it up and bound the pages with yarn. This three-page, six-chapter fantasy is still in the author’s private archives. Upon reaching adulthood, Jim produced nine novels of speculative fiction, including the critically acclaimed Godhead Trilogy. He has won the World Fantasy Award (for
and
), the Nebula Award (for “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge” and the novella
), and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (for the novella
). A fulltime fiction writer, Jim makes his home in State College, Pennsylvania, with his wife, his son, an enigmatic sheepdog, and a loopy beagle. He is hard at work on a novel about Darwinism and its discontents.
Other books by James Morrow
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