How to hang a witch is a dark book by Adriana Mather, a paranormal romance that transports us to an evocative environment between legends, truth, history and witches. As the title goes, the book is set in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1692 theater of the witch trial. A village destined to remain in history for the tragic events that in a few months led to the indictment of 200 people, almost all women. In Adriana Mather’s book we are in present-day Salem, Samantha Mather returns to the family resort because her father is mysteriously in a coma. He then arrives in his father’s house but finds tension, mistrust in the community.

How to Hang a Witch, than we open a parenthesis

You will have noticed that the surname of the protagonist is the same as that of the writer. The Mather are a definite piece of the Salem witch trial story. The author of the paranormal romance is a direct descendant of Cotton Mather, a Protestant pastor, an authoritative profile of the ecclesiastical world, convinced of the need to return to the origins of Puritanism. Mather was the son of a congregationist pastor, Increase Mather, with whom he had a bad relationship. Proof was precisely the division of approach with respect to the Salem witch trial that Cotton not only documented, written, but nurtured, negatively influencing the results. The events of the Salem process have been the object of inspiration for numerous literary and cinematographic works, but also for the TV series. The recent Salem series, three seasons, from 2014 to 2017 also features the role of Mather, father and son.

But back to our novel

How to Hang a Witch. I wanted to give you some contextual elements to understand how the writer turned to the history of her ancestors to animate the plot of the book. There are deaths that have been repeated for centuries, a town still divided by the ancient odes, and a love that defies time. A novel to read.