The Witching Tide

April 1, 2023

Praised upon its UK publication, this debut revisits the witch hunts of 1600s England. Witchfinder Silas Makepeace has arrived in the town of Cleftwater and is soon rounding up local women. To midwife/healer Martha Hallybread's horror, she's tasked with searching the accused for "devil's marks" and must decide whether to protect herself or them. Will her mother's old witching doll shield her--and the secret she hides? Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 3, 2023
A mute midwife becomes a target of the 17th-century East Anglian witch hunt in Meyer’s immersive if murky debut. Martha Hallybread, 47, lives with Kit, whom she nursed as a child, and his family, and uses her knowledge of herbs to treat illnesses and deliver babies. The day after she and a servant named Prissy deliver a neighbor’s baby with fatal birth defects, Prissy is accused of witchcraft and arrested. Kit, hoping to shield Martha from execution, convinces the court to employ her as one of the women scouring the bodies of the accused for witch marks. Martha tries to leverage her new role to protect the accused, but matters take a turn for the worse when Kit’s pregnant wife, Agnes, is also accused of witchcraft because of her association with Martha. Things get a little hazy in the third act, as Martha uses the poppet she inherited from her mother to put a hex on the witchfinder who’d accused her and Agnes, though Meyer remains coy as to whether or not the magic is real. Still, the author offers a stirring depiction of the selfishness, revenge, and fear behind the accusations. This evocative narrative is sure to pique readers’ curiosity about the witch trials. Agent: Kimberly Witherspoon, InkWell Management.

August 1, 2023
"We got no witches in Cleftwater. Leastways, we had none, until the witch man came." A woman accused of witchcraft sums up the situation in Meyer's fraught tale of misogyny, prejudice, and mob rule in 1640s England. Martha Hallybread, an aging and mute servant in the household of her beloved master, Kit, uses her knowledge of botanicals and herbs to help generations of villagers in the East Anglian town of Cleftwater through pregnancy, childbirth, and illness. When Cleftwater is visited by the reign of terror caused by the itinerant "witch man" and the hideous methods he employs to prove women's status as witches, Martha is overwhelmed by conflicting loyalties: to her master, to her fellow servants, to fellow villagers, to herself, and to the fading memory of her Mam and the opaque legacy she left for Martha. (Among the few cherished keepsakes she has from her mother is a small wax doll--a poppet--which acts as a talisman and comfort and, ultimately, source of mystical power for the beleaguered Martha.) Perhaps the most corrosive of these conflicts is the one within Martha herself as she struggles to reconcile aspects of her own nature with blunderbuss accusations raised against women struggling to survive in an environment of poverty and ignorance. As witch-hunt mania overcomes the village, the tide of public opinion turns against Martha and other village women, and they are forced to defend themselves against increasingly barbaric methods of interrogation, coerced confession, and execution. Based on records of an actual period of witch hunts in East Anglia during the years of the English civil war, Meyer's saga of prejudicial ignorance and the horrors that result from innuendo campaigns is replete with period and chilling atmospheric detail. Meyer's narrative illuminates a dark historical period (and cautions against its re-creation).

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2023
Mute and on the cusp of uselessness (late middle age) in seventeenth-century England, Martha has carved a niche as a midwife, healer, and servant to a beloved master with a petulant, pregnant wife. When a traveler purporting to be a witchfinder rolls his dark tide toward Martha's seaside village of Cleftwater, she is horrified to be tasked with serving the witchfinder as a "searcher" of women's bodies, seeking out "devil's marks," especially because she carries a poppet of her own. As townswomen are arrested, Martha treads a fine line between safety and complicity. With characters refreshingly of their time, rather than straw men parroting the mores of ours, this novel is an immersive tale of the East Anglian witch trials as seen through the eyes of an absorbing protagonist. It showcases the horrors inflicted by social hysteria, and offers a three-dimensional view of individual participants whose roles and motivations are differently shaped by religious faith, interpersonal connections, and intellectual acuity. This is an accomplished debut work by an author to watch.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.