Review
From the book jacket: Jennet Stearne's
father hangs witches for a living in Restoration England. But
when this precocious child witnesses the horrifying death of her
beloved Aunt Isobel, unjustly executed as a sorceress, she makes
it her life's mission to bring down the Parliamentary Witchcraft
Act. A self-educated "natural philosopher," Jennet is inspired
in her quest by a single sentence in a cryptic letter from Isaac
Newton:
It so happens that in the Investigations leading
first to my Conjectures concerning Light and later to my System
of the World, I fell upon a pretty Proof that Wicked Spirits
enjoy no essential Existence. Armed with nothing but the
power of reason and her memory of Isobel's love, Jennet cannot
rest until she has put the last witchfinder out of...
Beyond the Book
James Morrow describes himself as
a 'scientific humanist'. His earlier
works tend to question religious
viewpoints, from organized religions all
the way through to atheism. For example,
in the first volume of his Godhead
Trilogy, written in the 1990s, the
2-mile long corpse of God is discovered
floating in the ocean and the Vatican
dispatches a supertanker to tow the
corpse to a tomb in the Arctic,
meanwhile a group of atheist extremists
plan on destroying the body, as it
proves they were wrong. In the second
volume, God's body is now part of a
religious theme park and God is put on
trial, in...
