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Colleen Rowley is like most girls at her prep school: stressed about boys, becoming valedictorian, getting into an elite university, and fighting through the typical drama and gossip that populates this sort of boarding school. But when the school's most popular, and perhaps most unbearable, student comes down with a mysterious illness and several classmates come down with it as well, the whole community quickly becomes consumed with fear and paranoia.
Rumors abound that the school is withholding the truth about the illness or that the HPV vaccine is causing the symptoms, but the hush-hush reaction of the school only adds to the fears. When concerned parents and a media-savvy activist take their concerns to television, the chaos increases ten-fold. The frenetic school barely even notices the sudden departure of a popular teacher, whom no one at the school seems to want to talk about.
While the teenage boarding school thriller that's rife with paranoia is hardly the most original of plotlines, Howe crafts an original tale that goes beyond the predictable framework that the plot might suggest. Colleen navigates not only dealing with the difficulties and confusion presented by the string of illnesses, but with getting into Harvard, fraying friendships, and a budding new romance in a way that is both extraordinarily mature and empathic, but still rings true for a teenage character.
A teacher assigns an extra credit project for Colleen that involves researching the early 18th century events that led to the Salem Witch trials - which happened in what's now Colleen's hometown - and she starts to see similarities. This point is driven home through frequent interludes that split up Colleen's story to returns to the hysteria of 1706, though one wonders at times if there would have been more subtlety and more of an element of surprise had Howe's focus had exclusively been on Colleen's tale. . This is not the first time Howe has explored Salem-related subject matter, as her first book (2009's THE PHYSICK BOOK OF DELIVERANCE DANE) covered similar ground, and as a result this feels like a retread, if a very good one, at times.
While this is Katherine Howe's third novel and she is commonly associated with a young-ish set of smart and creative writers of literary and historical mysteries along with Matthew Pearl, Louis Bayard, and Lyndsey Faye; this is her first foray into the growing YA market and at times that shows. While her portrayal of teenagers is spot-on, sometimes it is as if Howe feels unsure of her footing in YA literature and as a result the plotting seems a bit less organic than it should be.
CONVERSION is at its best when using the events to effectively explore media-driven hysteria, paranoia, the nature of friendships, and the powerfully destructive consequence of groupthink and gossip. While the nature of the YA market lends itself to trilogies and series, CONVERSION refreshingly feels like a complete work and while it may feel overly familiar to some, it is a timely and refreshing YA mystery that manages effectively to tie together the past with the present.
§ Ben Neal is a librarian who likes to fancy himself an amateur writer, humorist, detective, and coffee connoisseur in his spare time. He can be reached at beneneal@indiana.edu.
Reviewed by Ben Neal, July 2014
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