Newes from the Dead (review)

This fictionalized account of a ripped-from-the-headlines event (the headlines of 1650, that is) opens with servant girl Anne Green slipping back into a state of consciousness following her hanging for the crime of infanticide. With her body still immobilized from the trauma, Anne tries to make sense of her present condition and, uncertain whether she's dead or alive, she passes the time by reviewing the sad chain of events that brought her to the gallows. Seduced by her employer's grandson, she delivered a premature, stillborn baby; in an effort to keep the family name unsullied and the grandson's propitious engagement on track, Sir Thomas Reade used his influence to have Anne charged with infanticide and hanged. While a seemingly dead Anne muses on this injustice, a team of scholars and physicians prepares to dissect her body, which they have purchased from the family at the time of the execution. A flicker of eye movement, a faint rale, and an uncertain pulse halt the proceedings, and as the attendant Sir Thomas bellows to carry on with the dissection, the medical men pool their strategies for reviving Anne, demonstrating how God's justice has been manifest through this miracle—and securing their own professional laurels into the bargain. Anne's comatose chronicle isn't the most convincing narrative vehicle, and Hooper's detailing of Anne's sexual encounters and the melodramatic build-up to the dissection-that-almost-was propel readers into role of prurient voyeur that she seems to criticize in Anne's contemporaries. Still, the based-on-fact story is undeniably compelling, and teens needn't wait until Halloween for a brush with the macabre.