A Break with Charity

I’ll admit, I approached *A Break with Charity* skeptical of yet another Salem witch trials novel—until Susanna English’s voice hooked me in the first chapter. This isn’t the story of a victim or a villain; it’s the unsettling portrait of a girl who *wants* to belong so badly she’ll ignore the cracks in her own logic. Rinaldi’s genius is in making Susanna’s complicity chillingly relatable: her envy of the ‘afflicted’ girls, her half-hearted resistance to her father’s skepticism, the way she clings to superstition like a lifeline. When the accusations start, the horror isn’t in the witchcraft—it’s in how *easy* it all feels. Laura Hicks’ narration is a masterclass in restraint. She resists the urge to melodramatize, instead letting Susanna’s youth and instability show in the way her voice wavers between defiance and desperation. The pacing drags slightly in the middle, as Susanna’s internal conflicts repeat without much forward momentum, but the payoff in the final act is worth it—especially the scene where she confronts her own role in the chaos. My one gripe? The audio mixing occasionally flattens Hicks’ dynamic range, making some of her quieter moments harder to catch in noisy environments. But that’s a minor quibble for an otherwise gripping performance. If you’re tired of witch trials as campy horror or dry history, this audiobook offers something rarer: a psychological razor’s edge, sharpened by a narrator who understands that the scariest stories aren’t about monsters—they’re about the monsters we ignore in ourselves.