Conversion by Katherine Howe (review)

Becoming class valedictorian and getting admitted to Harvard are Colleen’s top priorities as she enters her senior year at St. Joan’s Academy, but when her friends and classmates at the elite private school start coming down with mysterious ailments, her attention quickly shifts from academics to discovering the source of this strange illness. It all begins when queen bee Clara Rutherford suddenly develops Tourette’s-like tics, and soon after other girls start losing their hair, having seizures, and even coughing up metallic substances. The school administration blames stress, the eventual media circus blames vaccines and/or pollution, but Colleen wonders if it isn’t related to the history of her small Massachusetts town—Danvers, formerly known as Salem village. Interludes set in Salem in 1706 (the year Salem accuser Ann Putnam publicly apologized) alternate with Colleen’s accounts of events, and an author’s note reveals that while the Salem panic provided obvious inspiration, so did a more recent true event in Le Roy, New York, where twenty teenagers started exhibiting bizarre symptoms. Colleen makes a fascinating narrator—she’s spent a lifetime being calm, cool, collected amid the academic elite, and she approaches this chaos with the same haughty confidence; it’s when the cracks in her façade begin to show late in the book that readers suddenly realize she may not be as reliable as she initially seemed. Her final encounter with the mother of her best friend is utterly chilling, and readers will be left pondering the pressure society puts upon young women and the anxiety that results when they buck those expectations.