Newes from the Dead
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4.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Intriguing and captivating."—Celia Rees, author of Witch Child
WRONGED. HANGED. ALIVE? (AND TRUE!)
Anne can't move a muscle, can't open her eyes, can't scream. She lies immobile in the darkness, unsure if she'd dead, terrified she's buried alive, haunted by her final memory—of being hanged. A maidservant falsely accused of infanticide in 1650 England and sent to the scaffold, Anne Green is trapped with her racing thoughts, her burning need to revisit the events—and the man—that led her to the gallows.
Meanwhile, a shy 18-year-old medical student attends his first dissection and notices something strange as the doctors prepare their tools . . . Did her eyelids just flutter? Could this corpse be alive?
Beautifully written, impossible to put down, and meticulously researched, Newes from the Dead is based on the true story of the real Anne Green, a servant who survived a hanging to awaken on the dissection table. Newes from the Dead concludes with scans of the original 1651 document that recounts this chilling medical phenomenon.
Newes from the Dead is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Hooper (The Remarkable Life and Times of Eliza Rose) bases this macabre novel on the chilling true story of Anne Green, a maidservant who in 1650 was hanged, thrown into a coffin... and "miraculously" revived just as the doctors at the medical school in Oxford were about to dissect her. From her purgatorial state inside the coffin, Anne recounts the details of her wretched life her seduction by the lying grandson and heir of Sir Thomas Reade, at whose estate Anne works; her pregnancy and miscarriage; her trial for infanticide, where a guilty verdict is virtually assured by Sir Thomas's fury at her for naming his grandson as the father. Alternating chapters describe events as experienced by witnesses, particularly a shy, stuttering medical student for whom the sight of Anne's corpse-like body reawakens a traumatic memory of his own (gratuitously occasioning a melodramatic subplot). As Oxford doctors observe tiny signs of life but cannot hasten Anne's awakening, Sir Thomas demands that justice be served; meanwhile others interpret Anne's state as a message from God. All the dissection-room debating slows the pace, but it's hard to take the edge off this plot. Ages 14 up.
