Charis in the World of Wonders

Charis in the World of Wonders by Marly Youmans. Young Charis’s mother wakes her, telling her to flee into the woods as the sounds of an attack on their colonial New England farm fills her ears. This startling opening sets in motion a soaring, harrowing, satisfying story of a teenage girl making her way through unknown forests, personal trauma, and the perils of witchcraft-fueled paranoia in 1690s Massachusetts. There are as many luminous moments in this novel as there are dark and dangerous ones, with Marly Youmans’s gorgeous prose in top form—not least from her deft use of weird period vocabulary. Evocative illustrations by Youmans’s longtime collaborator Clive Hicks-Jenkins add another layer of magic to a book that will make you think as much as it will make you keep turning pages. —Christopher Phillips, professor of English