Burning Issy - Softcover

Melvin Burgess has written several highly acclaimed novels, including Billy Elliot; Doing It, winner of the Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize; and Smack which has been translated into 28 different languages. He has been shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal four additional times, including for The Cry of the Wolf.

Grade 5-8-For as long as 12-year-old Issy has lived with Nat, a healer, she has been tormented by a nightmare of hellfire, but more troubling are her ungodly powers-she can burn those who wish to harm her or her loved ones. When Nat's loyalty to her falters because she attracts the attention of a witchfinder, the local witches-satan worshippers-compel her to join them, but she is rescued from that fate by Iohan, who had given her to Nat 10 years earlier. Iohan enters the scene like a fresh spring breeze-she laughs a lot (or "gurgles," as Burgess is fond of saying), but readers will thirst for more details of her religion and wonder about the differences between her witchcraft and that of the local hags. Issy, too, is racked by confusion-she eventually convinces herself that her new guardian is evil and puts herself in the hands of the magistrate. In a rather vague, whirlwind scene, the Goddess and the Horned Man help her break free from imprisonment, but in the meantime Iohan has been captured and literally broken. In the end, Issy is determined to help keep Iohan's religion alive. Despite its unsatisfying elements and the somewhat distant tone of the first-person narrative, this novel has moments when it captures the immense power that the image of the witch wielded over early 17th-century English minds.
Vanessa Elder, School Library Journal
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.