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Conversion

Published by Rock the Boat
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

LIST PRICE ₹285.00

PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER

About The Book

Colleen is feeling the heat. It’s her final year of school, and university applications and deciphering boys’ texts have turned life into a pressure cooker. Colleen and her friends are expected to somehow keep it all together – until they can’t.

The first victim is gorgeous, popular Clara who starts having loud and uncontrollable tics while her horrified classmates look on. More students follow suit with new symptoms: seizures, body vibrations, violent coughing fits, and hair loss. The media descends as school officials, angry parents and health experts scramble to find something, or someone, to blame. But there is one thing no one has factored in: the school’s town was once Salem Village, the site of a similarly bizarre epidemic among teenage girls three hundred years earlier – and it seems history is about to repeat itself.

About The Author

Katherine Howe is the author of the #2 New York Times bestseller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, as well as The House of Velvet and Glass. She is widely considered an expert on American colonial life and the Salem Witch Trials, having written both as an academic and a novelist on the subject. She is the author of The Penguin Book of Pirates (forthcoming, Feb 2024). Katherine lives and sails in New England with her family

Product Details

  • Publisher: Rock the Boat (June 4, 2015)
  • Length: 432 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781780747736
  • Ages: 13 - 18

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Raves and Reviews

‘Perhaps the best thing about the book is its tense, paranoid atmosphere; the way it evokes the everyday pressure of being an ambitious, emotionally vulnerable teen, while simultaneously showing just how easily this pressure can twist into something monstrous.’

– Telegraph, Best YA Books 2015

‘A superbly crafted, multi-layered thriller, that will resonate with anyone who has had to study The Crucible as a set text.’

– Independent, Best YA Books of 2015

'Sensational'

– The Tablet

‘...this creepy, gripping novel is intimately real and layered, shedding light on the challenges teenage girls have faced throughout history. Particularly in situations of powerlessness, Conversion shows, stress can reveal itself in mysterious ways.

– New York Times

‘[Howe] has a gift for capturing the teenage mindset that nears the level of John Green ... there's no one better to bewitch teens and adults alike with a modern tale of gripping panic.’

– USA Today

‘Richly drawn characters and period language ... a deliberate build-up of escalating tension and suspense.’

– Kirkus Reviews

‘Howe’s writing is suspenseful and effortlessly draws the reader in.’

– VOYA, starred review

‘Engrossing and thought-provoking.’

– Boston Globe

Conversion melds the best bits of private school drama (think Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep) with the mystique of the supernatural. Pick it up this fall for a good old-fashioned mystery and maybe even a flashback to your high school years (for better or for worse). Be prepared to love this bewitching page-turner!’

– Christian Science Monitor

'A simmering blend of relatable high-school drama with a persistent pinprick of unearthliness in the background.'

– Booklist

'A chilling guessing game of a novel that will leave readers thinking about the power (and powerlessness) of young women in the past and present alike.'

– Publishers Weekly, starred review

'Howe skillfully blends a modern medical mystery based on real events with the historical Salem Witch panic ... will keep readers guessing until the final reveal.'

– School Library Journal

‘Brilliant, scary, and impossible to put down, Conversion weaves together the Salem witch trials with a mysterious present-day illness that sweeps through an all-girls high school. It's the perfect storm of suspense, history, romance, and teen angst. A five-star read!’

– Nancy Ohlin, author of Always, Forever and Beauty

‘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

‘How is it possible for a novel to be funny, suspenseful, tender, wickedly satiric, and terrifying all at once? When it's written by the bewitchingly talented Katherine Howe. Once again she transports us back in time to the tragic events in Salem Village that led to the deaths of more than twenty innocent citizens. This time, however, she turns an equally discerning eye on the academic and social pressures of an elite private school in contemporary times. The parallels she draws between the two worlds are provocative and haunting; whether you're a parent or a high-school student, you'll never look at the college rat race the same way again!’

– Julia Glass, National Book Award–winning author of And the Dark Sacred Night and The Three Junes

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