Historic Holocaust: Incantation by Alice Hoffman

"Something from deep inside the world had crept up from the well; a monster set loose in our midst. The fire was its breath; the jeers all around were his snarls. I felt something burn inside of me."

Sixteen-year-old Estrella deMadrigal thought her world--her close friend Catalina, her pet pig Dini, her home and village where her family had lived for 500 years--would never change. Then, in the first throes of the Spanish Inquisition in 1500, there are burnings of Jewish books in her town square and soon after come public torture and the executions of those living in the Juderia, where Jews who had refused to convert 100 years before were segregated from the Christian and Muslim enclaves in the village of Encalaflora.

As the turmoil roils the surface of her pleasant life, Estrella begins to wonder about some of her family's own customs. They light candles on Friday nights only, even though it grows dark at dinner time on every other night. They choose not to eat the meat of the pigs they raise. They attend a small church on the other side of the village and cross themselves differently from the others around them. Then there are the secret names the family has for each other; her grandmother is Sarah, and Estrella's mother calls her Esther in private moments. Her grandfather has a secret room beneath the house filled with books where he teaches and practices medicine deep into the night, and he presses Estrella's brilliant brother into attending seminary so that he can take over as priest of their chosen church.

Gradually, Estrella comes to realize that her family are Marranos, Jews who accepted the conversion forced upon the Jewish holdouts, but secretly kept their faith over the past century. Finally, her mother and grandparents reveal the truth of her suspicions and warn her that these terrible times require secrecy.

Jealous because the boy she wished to marry seems to have chosen Estrella, her friend Catalina reports the family to the Catholic authorities, who come to arrest and torture the truth from her grandfather, mother, and brother. Estrella and her grandmother escape and in disguise witness the cruel deaths of her mother, grandfather, and brother, tortured and burned at the stake. With the help of a Muslim doctor and the young man who loves her, Estrella and her grandmother finally begin a journey to Amsterdam with hopes of emigrating to the island of Hispaniola and the hope of a new life.

In Incantation Hoffman's writing is grounded in great detail and yet lyrical and compelling in style. Young adult readers will find much to think about in this five-hundred year old story which is as fresh as today's news.