The topic of this book is right up my street - and I really enjoy deep diving into the history of the 'witch' throughout the years all over the world.
However, I found this book really difficult to get through. Lee's writing style was very intricate and I really struggled. It was very dense.
Not for me.

This was very good. I had never heard of the author before but Carol Ann Lee does a great job at examining records, presenting the evidence, trying to give a bit of flesh to people who have left no records themselves. I thought I knew roughly what happened during the Pendle witch trials, but it was actually a lot more complicated than I expected, partly because a lot of the characters have the same first names (mothers and daughters often do), the same last names without being exactly related, and because there's a lot going on, with characters all linked through various ways - so and so's daughter's goddaughter was the neighbour of so and so, who accused the former's sister in law, etc. It can be hard to follow at times, but Carol Ann Lee also did an excellent job at giving a context I didn't have - I read a few other books on witchcraft the past couple of years so I knew what books had been published back then and what the legal system said, but she also goes at length about the religious context and the persecution of Catholics. There's a chapter about the White Pater Noster that the Device family used as a "charm" and its regional variations, and the suspicion that fell on anyone who may be a papist, with your neighbours watching you and using it against you. She's also very detailed when it comes to the abject poverty that people experienced. Overall I think I had come to think of witchcraft solely or mostly as a feminist theme, and she made it about this and about economic inequalities and religious persecution.

Free ARC sent by Netgalley.

An interesting book covering the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612, going into as much detail as is possible given the time past and records available (if anything, it goes into a little too much detail and that slows it down at times). The author also uses imagination and supposition to fill in some gaps, especially around how people ‘must’ have been feeling, which is always a little jarring to me but she is obviously passionate about the subject and it shows.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advance copy in return for an honest review.

An interesting , if sometimes rambling, account of the Pendleton Witches . I watched the recent television programme featuring Suranne Jones about the same subject and that piqued my curiosity. Unfortunately I felt that that the tv programme did it better (that is almost sacrilegious in this book loving family) although there were some interesting points made in the book.

Sadly couldn’t finish it. As a descendant of one of the Pendle witches I was interested in how the author would present her, but sadly the writing style was so poor that I just couldn’t finish the story. The author likes going off at tangents which detract from the overall theme, and make the reader lose both their interest and stream of thought. A good example of this is at the beginning where the author spends about a chapter in retelling about her childhood holidays and programs she used to watch.