Waiting on Wednesday #30 - Conversion by Katherine Howe

"Waiting on Wednesday" is a weekly event hosted by Jill over at Breaking the Spine where we spotlight upcoming releases we are eagerly anticipating. 

I've long been fascinated by all things witchy. And since I took a field trip with my parents to Salem when I was in third grade (many years ago), I became fascinated also with what happened there to those poor people in 1692. The hysteria, accusations, hangings etc that began with Tituba only seemed to end when the Governer's wife was accused of being a witch.

Conversion by Katherine Howe is due to be released July 1, 2014 by Putnam Juvenile. As best I can tell, the conversion in the title refers to the psychological conversion disorder where anxiety and stressful situations result in neurological symptoms with no physical causes.

Summary from Goodreads.com 

It’s senior year at St. Joan’s Academy, and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together. Until they can’t.
 
First it’s the school’s queen bee, Clara Rutherford, who suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Her mystery illness quickly spreads to her closest clique of friends, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumor; rumor blossoms into full-blown panic.
 
Soon the media descends on Danvers, Massachusetts, as everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Or are the girls faking? Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . .
 
Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell. With her signature wit and passion, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what’s really happening to the girls at St. Joan’s?

What book are you waiting on this week?