Unexpected Suprises!

Hey Bookies!

Received an unexpected surprise this past Thursday ... a ARC from one of my professors!

Okay, so let me backtrack. This semester one of the classes I am taking is Ghosts in American Culture (does that not sound cool or what?!) and my professor, get this, is a New York Times Bestselling author! Oh, and apparently she is related to Elizabeth Howe and Elizabeth Proctor from the infamous Salem Witch Trials. Crazy right?!

Katherine Howe is the New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, The House of Velvet and Glass, and Conversion. She has hosted “Salem: Unmasking the Devil” for the National Geographic Channel, and her fiction has been translated into over twenty-five languages. A native Texan, she lives in New England and upstate New York, where she teaches at Cornell and is at work on her next novel.

Author photo copyright Laura Dandaneau.
Click Here to download a high resolution version.

You can check out her website: HERE


Anywho, Tuesday during class she asked if anyone was a YA book blogger. Being the private person I am, did not raise my hand but instead, spoke to her after class was over. It was then that she offered to give me an ARC of her latest work and you can guess what my answer was. The rest is history. Last night I finally cracked the cover and stayed up 'till 4AM, droopy-eyed and all because it is so good.

Take a look for yourselves:

"Smart, compelling, exciting, and completely absorbing. Katherine Howe is stunningly deft at blurring the lines between the emotional and the supernatural. I recommend clearing your calendar before you start reading this novel."

—David Liss, bestselling author of The Twelfth Enchantment

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?

Happy Reading!