Here’s the description from the book sleeve:
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…
I love Katherine Howe and will read anything she writes. I devoured The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane as well as The House of Velvet and Glass. This book was no exception! And the copy I got to read was super special because I had it signed by Katherine Howe at BEA!! She was so sweet and I will cherish this book forever.
I love how her main characters are always so immediately relatable. Colleen reminded me of myself and my friends in high school, stressing about college, wondering what the future would hold. Sure, I knew I was going to a state school and wasn’t dealing with the pressure of ivy league, but senior year still produced a lot of stress for me. Colleen is flawed but it makes you feel for her even more because of it. She is your typical teen. She is so smart and has a great group of friends. But she’s also selfish like a lot of teens are known to be (I know I was!). She thinks so much of herself that she barely knows what’s going in her friends’ lives.
The flashback scenes were fantastic, as they always are with Howe’s books. And this one went back to the Salem Witch Trials, which reminded me a bit of Deliverance Dane. This book focused though on the girls who became “afflicted” and how they came to spewing off names of “witches”. It was a very interesting concept and I ate it up.
Another very interesting part of the book that I really loved was how it was based on a similar case of “afflicted girls” that happened a few years ago in Leroy, NY, which is not too far outside of Buffalo (my home, in case you didn’t know). I remember when the girls started having weird ticks and other symptoms in Leroy. It was all over the local news for months and months. So as I read this book, I thought a lot about that situation.
I loved this book. It begs you to ask the question-what was really going on with the afflicted girls during the Salem Witch Trials? And what was really going on in Colleen’s school? I highly recommend it, especially if you loved Howe’s previous books and like YA.
Title: Conversion
Author: Katherine Howe
Date of Publication: July 1st, 2014
Number of Pages: 402
Genre: Fiction/YA
Source: Signed Copy of BEA!
A Book and a Beer 
This sounds wonderfully fun! I have to get.