new england

Witch trials are already a thing of the past in this historical novel set in Salem, Massachusetts during the lifetime of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter. Witch trials are over; but their memory lives on in Hawthorne’s nineteenth century, with tensions lingering amongst the old Salem families and Hawthorne himself bearing ancestral guilt over his own great-great-grandfather's role in sentencing accused women to death more than a century earlier.

But Hawthorne is not front and center here. He is upstaged by a new immigrant from Scotland, Isobel Gamble, who becomes his lover

When I picked up this book, I thought the title was reflective of a "good" house as opposed to a "bad" house, but actually the lead character and narrator of the novel is named Hildy Good. Hildy is a successful real estate agent in Wendover, Massachusetts, a town along Boston's north shore, where she "makes it her business to know everybody's business." She is the mother of two grown daughters and is an ex-wife to a husband who revealed to her he was gay after 20-plus years of marriage. This darkly comic story revolves around the fact that she is also a not-so recovering alcoholic, adept at

If you’ve ever done genealogical (or historical) research and felt the intrigue and energy of peeling back layers of information to open windows on the past, this is a beautifully written description of the process. Ms. Gerzina embarked on a search to authenticate the story of Lucy Terry. Born a slave in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts, Lucy Terry was reputed to have argued a case before the Supreme Court. How much of this story could be true? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to document it? And who was this woman, really?Gerzina’s research took her to small libraries, universities