Retracing the
Witch Trials
October 19 through 30, 2024
Enjoy live events, streaming, social media with Julia Park Tracey, author of Silence
Get ready for a spellbinding experience! From October 19 to 30, award-winning author Julia Park Tracey embarks on her Retracing the Witch Trials Tour, making stops at bookstores, libraries, museums, historical societies, and festivals across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire.
As she delves into her acclaimed novel Silence, Julia will transport you back to the harrowing days of the witch trials. Learn about the era's fascinating handicrafts, the harsh limitations imposed on women, and the remarkable ways they found their voices amidst oppression. Discover the deep ancestral research (Thanks to Ancestry.com) that brings this captivating story to life. Now you can take this enchanting journey with Julia through history, literature, and empowerment.
Join Julia Park Tracey live as she transports you into the world of Silence! Streaming from real-life locations featured in her novel, Julia will walk the very wharves and visit the Greenleaf Apothecary shop site in Boston. She'll take you to the shores of Cohasset and Hull, where the Puritan woman Silence once wandered, and to the historic Bolton cemetery where her own seventh great-grandmother, Silence, rests. Step into the dark history of the witch trials as Julia visits infamous sites like the Great Elm hanging tree on Boston Common and the gallows in Salem. Through these powerful settings, Julia will talk with her readers, sharing the terrifying history of how the persecution of "witches" was used to control both rebellious and everyday women. Join us on this immersive and chilling journey into the past!
Retrace the Witch Trials with Julia Park Tracey
Silence: A Novel
After three grievous losses, Puritan woman Silence Marsh dares to question God aloud in the church, and that blasphemy lands her in trouble—she is silenced for a year by the powers that govern. Broken in heart and spirit, Silence learns to mime and sign, but it isn’t until a new Boston doctor comes to her backward Cape Cod village that she begins to hope again. Rather than treating Silence with bleeding or leeches, Dr. Greenleaf prescribes fresh air, St. John’s Wort, long walks—and reading.
Silence has half a hope of getting through her year of punishment when the cry of witchcraft poisons the village. Colonial Massachusetts is still reeling from the Salem Witch Trials just 20 years before. Now, after they demanded her silence, she is called to witness at a witchcraft trial—or be accused herself.
A whiff of sulfur and witchcraft shadows this literary Puritan tale of loss and redemption, based on this bestselling historical fiction author’s own ancestor, her seventh great-grandmother.
“… a powerful, lyrical marvel of a novel.”
About Julia Park Tracey
Author Julia Park Tracey’s ancestors and their stories have given her a trail to follow from New York and New England to the deep south and the Pacific Coast. The Bereaved: A Novel, the story of her great great grandmother’s loss of her children to the Orphan Train was named in the top 100 indie books published in 2023 by Kirkus Reviews. Christian Kiefer, author of the newly released The Heart of it All, said: “In The Bereaved, Julia Park Tracey reopens America’s wounds in prose that is propulsive and resonant. Theodore Dreiser comes to mind, but so, too, the fine contemporary novels of Jo Baker and Maggie O’Farrell.”