The Hemlock Cure by Joanne Burn

Book Review

I finished this book in a day. One of those rare days when you actually get to just sit on the sofa and you’re not expected to do anything!

I throughly enjoyed this tale based part in history, part in folklore and part in fiction.

Here’s the blurb:

It is 1665 and the women of Eyam keep many secrets. Isabel Frith, the village midwife, walks a dangerous line with her herbs and remedies. There are men in the village who speak of witchcraft, and Isabel has a past to hide. So she tells nobody her fears about Wulfric, the pious, reclusive apothecary. Mae, Wulfric's youngest daughter, dreads her father's rage if he discovers what she keeps from him. Like her feelings for Rafe, Isabel's ward, or that she studies from Wulfric's forbidden books at night.But others have secrets too. Secrets darker than any of them could have imagined. When Mae makes a horrifying discovery, Isabel is the only person she can turn to. But helping Mae will place them both in unspeakable peril.And meanwhile another danger is on its way from London. One that threatens to engulf them all . . .

Joanne Burn places this tale within the time of the plague and the setting of the village of Eyam. I remember learning about Eyam when I was in junior school and how its policy of lockdown helped to stop the plague from spreading further - sound familiar.

Furthermore, Burn weaves in the element of witchcraft and the suspicion and very real danger anyone who was using any other means of a cure, other than praying to a god or what was considered to be medical science held in the main by men, was in and how they were likely to be considered a friend of the devil.

The story shows how in a time when your life is under threat from an uncertain and uncontrollable force, we often react in the strangest and most extreme ways.

A classic storyteller’s trick, by placing this story in the very real setting of Eyam during the plague, Burn takes something that happened a long time ago and holds it up like a mirror to the modern.

If you love history, folklore and suspense, this is the book for you.

You can buy Joanne Burn’s , ‘The Hemlock Cure’ in all good bookshops. If you would like to buy a copy online, please consider visiting my page on Bookshop.org where I have gathered some of the books I read and recommend. Here you will find a plethora of myth, legend and folktale.

And don’t forget to support your local library too and see if they have a copy to borrow.