Witchcraft Legacy: Stories from the Big Attic

Review\n"Brewster presents a memoir that's intriguingly unconventional in style and structure. Although the narrative is built around the nearly 400-year-old tomes, it quickly transcends them and ultimately relates not only the author's family history, but also a reflection on human nature...Overall, it's an affecting work, and a thoughtful and engrossing meditation on attempting to come to grips with family difficulties that, as presented here, seem to have an air of inexorability. Brewster's writing is elegantly polished, but also casually anecdotal, and the remembrance as a whole is so concise that readers are likely to be left wanting to read more of his recollections. A captivating and movingly elegiac memoir."—Kirkus Reviews\nA "mesmerizing memoir" and "strikingly original book" by a "sharp-eyed chronicler of American privilege...[f]acing the past with tenderness and strength in brisk, intricate prose touched with grace."—BookLife Reviews\n"Highly recommended for memoir readers, American history students, and fans of genealogical research and family legacies alike, Witchcraft Legacy's ability to combine intrigue, research, facts, and personal experience under one cover makes for a rare glimpse into a unique inheritance that should be on the shelves of any general-interest and many a specialty library." —D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review\n2022 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist\nThe legacy of the 1692 Salem witch trials looms large in the American imagination; for some, that legacy is especially personal.\nWhen, as children, Richard Brewster and his brother found a steamer trunk in their attic filled with old family books and papers, they unearthed an ancient book once owned by William Stoughton, the chief judge of the trials. In crabbed, handwritten flyleaf notes, Stoughton described someone being mercilessly haunted and perhaps tortured by "Evil Spirits." To the boys, the Evil Spirits seemed to cast a family curse, long buried in the trunk.\nWitchcraft Legacy is a remarkable personal and family memoir in which Brewster tells true stories of love, death-including murder-and life's surprising turns as he traces the history of Stoughton's book and the curse of its Evil Spirits. With tales spanning four centuries, as the book passed from hand to hand over the generations, Brewster speaks to the reader in a voice that intimately conveys the universal human experience behind every story.