Conversion by Katherine Howe mixes real events from the present and the past to create a suspenseful story that will keep you up at night.

In Fall 2012, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe was sitting in a Meineke in upstate New York waiting for a taillight to be fixed when inspiration for her young adult debut, Conversion (on sale July 1, 2014; Putnam; Ages 12 up), struck in the form of a cable news report. An hour away in LeRoy, NY, 16 teenage girls had come down with a series of inexplicable physical symptoms, including uncontrollable tics and stutters. They finally had received a diagnosis: an outbreak of the rare conversion disorder.

At the time, Howe was also teaching a class on historical fiction at Cornell University, and that week’s topic was The Crucible. She immediately saw a connection between the difficulty of girls’ lives in the past and how that manifested itself in a dangerous panic in Salem, with the pressures that teenage girls are under today and what was happening in her own backyard.

Inspired by these true events, Conversion casts a spell. With her signature wit and passion, bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what‘s really happening to the girls at St. Joan’s?

Synopsis

It’s senior year at St. Joan’s Academy, and the pressure is high. 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, queen bee Clara Rutherford suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Soon, other students also fall victim to these inexplicable symptoms. The school buzzes with rumor, and rumor turns into full blown panic when the media descend on the small town of Danvers, MA. Only Colleen – who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit – comes to realize what nobody else has: this isn’t the first time this has happened. Three centuries ago, Danvers was once Salem Village.

Interwoven with the story of Ann Putnam, who was at the very center of the Salem panic, Conversion demonstrates exactly what can happen when teenage girls are pushed to their breaking points.

About Katehrine Howe

Katherine Howe is the New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, The House of Velvet and Glass, and Conversion. She has hosted “Salem: Unmasking the Devil” for the National Geographic Channel, and her fiction has been translated into over 25 languages. A native Texan, she lives in New England and upstate New York, where she teaches at Cornell and is at work on her next novel.

Conversion releases on July 1 and is available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and IndieBound.