Witch's Trinity

Yup, I know the author:

Envy is a glorious spectator sport. In a homogenous community, when it merges with gossip and superstition, it can shine with a murderous glow. These vices are often considered women's evils, as in Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" or as with conniving French and Russian housewives who denounced neighbors to Nazis or the KGB to get a better apartment. But a steadier gaze reveals the man-made (note gender) scaffolding that allows fear and anger to eat up a group of people.

"The Witch's Trinity" is a revisiting of this topic, beautifully written, nary a word out of place, and with a few moments that throw you beyond - the way good books do. Oakland writer Erika Mailman's first novel, about medieval German witch trials, is set in the famine-beset village of Tierkinddorf, where people are keen to discover the "witch" responsible for the bad harvests. No, it doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before, but so what? It's a tasty morsel of a book, with deeper undertones to bother you after.
...
One eerie aspect of the book is that it makes the reader take part in the vast fun of condemning others - even though it's the accusers we're invited to hate. But Mailman makes clear that outcasts and people on the edge of society, such as old or unusual women, are dangerous. Dangerous because they bring out the beast in the mob. All it takes is stress married to the smallest warrant from authority, and crowds become dragons at the beck and call of whoever is in charge.

"The Witch's Trinity" is quietly wonderful. If there is a flaw, it's that it should have had more dreaming. The unanswered questions are deeply satisfying, and it's Güde's dreams and the bits of paganism, which seem like the village's own dream, that fuel them. But the story has an unshakable emotional truth. And the author is faithful to it; she never pauses to try to make a point. That's the reader's job.

BUY IT, WITCHES!  I think My Favorite Witch might even like this...

ntodd