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Gallows Hill

Gallows Hill

List Price: $5.50
Your Price: $4.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Witches of Salem
Review: A Review by Tiffany

This story is based on a girl named Sarah who is asked to be a Fortune Teller at the up and coming Halloween Carnival by Eric, she tells him no but he keeps on persisting. Later on Charlie her soon to be step brother informs Sarah that he lived during the Salem Witch Trials and said "You were there too Sarah." She asks why and he says "You'll find out." Close to the end Eric takes Sarah to a "party" when their actually going to "Gallows Hill."

I liked the part where they're about to hang her when Charlie interrupts her peers from hanging her. Also I liked it when she was reading a book about the Salem witch Trials and saw her name as the people who were hung. I just liked the whole book. This can relate in today's world because they judged Sarah for what she looked like and not who she was.

I recommend this book for young adults because there is some swearing and some hijinx that parents wouldn't want their children to read it. I give this book 5 stars because of its intensity and it's insight on the witch trials during the 18th century. I would want to read this book again because it's the best book I've ever read.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A very intense book, but just as good as her others
Review: I liked this book a lot. It was very interesting, but I have to admit that it was very hard to read without getting so mad. Lois Duncan writes so well that you feel as if you're in Sarah's position. Everyone is unfair to her, and people always lie about her, and they make her take full blame for bad things they convinced and helped her do. It's enough to make the reader furious at all the other characters. And I really hated Kyra. This, however, doesn't make the book bad. It just means that the book is extremely well-written. It was suspenseful, too. Sarah saw visions of real events that were past or future. You wondered what would happen next. It was also very suspenseful when Sarah would take a walk and get followed. Over-all, I thought that it was a great book. The plot was interesting, and I liked Sarah's character. The only thing I didn't like about it was the idea of reincarnation. I thought it was weird.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Gallows Hill
Review: Welcome to Pine Crest, where Sarah Zoltanne has been dragged from sunny California by her mom's love for Ted Thompson, a local school teacher. But Sarah's image of the Christian town of Pine Crest soon changes after playing a fortune-telling gypsy at the school's Halloween carnival. However, with help from her new friend Charlie she starts to find out that everything that's happening is for a reason, a very old reason.
What I liked about the book was the connection it had with the Salem Witch Trials. And once I realize just how close that connection was I didn't want to put down the book. However, it also led to why I disliked the book. The citizens of Pine Crest are narrow-minded to new ideas. They even burnt down a bookstore because it sold such books on reincarnation.
In the end, I recommend this book to any Duncan fan or anyone who has read The Crucible. I especially feel it's important to have read The Crucible so you know how the two books tie together, but at the same time you won't be lost if you've never read it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Witch or Destiny?
Review: Sarah Zoltanne, a normal California girl, must face her destiny when her mother decides to move their family to Pine Crest in Gallows Hill, by Lois Duncan. Pine Crest is one big creepy city with one big creepy attitude: my way or the high way. When Sarah portrays an accurate fortune selling gypsy at a school carnival, her peers start to think that she is a witch. Sarah is mistreated at school and at home by her mother's new boyfriend, and is miserable in Pine Crest. On top of that, Sarah can't figure out why she can see images and events in the fake crystal ball that come true. She also begins to have vivid dreams about the Salem witchcraft trials, which she thinks has something to do with her terrible situation. Sarah teams up with another school reject named Charlie to try to right the terrible wrongs that are going on around them before it is too late...

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone with a thirt for mystery and suspense and a big imagination.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Madam Zoltanne a Witch or Just Different
Review: Gallows hill by Lois Duncan was a mysterious book about a senior by the name of Sarah Zoltanne that is forced to move to a small town where the man of her mother's dreams lives, Ted. During her stay she meets a popular student named Eric that makes her cheeks rosy, and the daughter of Ted, Kyra, that puts the fury in her eyes. She also meets an over weight student, Charlie that turns out to be her shoulder to lean on. The suspicion starts when Eric uses his charm on Sarah and persuades her to be apart of the senior class carnival. She accepts the offer and turns into Madam Zoltanne. At the carnival Sarah used a glass paperweight as her crystal ball, and while she was telling fortunes cloudy visions appeared within the paperweight. Is she a witch, or just different? Read Gallows Hill by lois Duncan to find out what they did to her.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Gallows Hill
Review: From the Best selling author of I Know What You Did Last Summer Lois Duncan wrote Hallows Hill. A very interesting book and very exciting as you would read through the book. The book starts as a teenage girl Sarah Zoltanne talks about a paper weight that really isn't just any paper weight but something that would get her in trouble with the hole town, and that a little thing to her at Pine Crest High School Sarah doesn't have friends there, but the kids that she gets to know aren't really her friends all because of a carnival. There is something evil about the town of Gallows Hill but Sarah doesn't think it will affect her but it does. This book starts a little slow that's why it is a four star instead of a five star, but as you read through it you will find out what true friends are and what it was like for Sarah Zoltanne to move from a town that is very busy in California to a little town that is boring for Sarah and her mother. As her mother meets a man that has a daughter named Kyra that doesn't get along with Sarah turns into the big misunderstanding by a lie that turns scary for Sarah. A lie that brings back the times of Witchcraft.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: She's Into Superstition, Black Cats, and Voodoo Dolls(?)
Review: This book really touches the heart as it tingles the spine. I felt for heroine Sarah as she is haunted by the memories of young Betty Parris, who triggered the Salem Witch Hunt, and persecuted by her classmates. I almost cried when no one believed what she said about the drawing of the noose and about the dead crow.
Another thing I loved was her relationship with the large-bodied-but-kindhearted-and-cute Charlie. That really touched my heart because I too was in love with a generously-sized gentleman.
This book is well-crafted and entertaining and just plain excellent. Buy two copies. You'll wear out the first from reading it so much. Lois D. does it again. I think all her "teen-suspense" books are great, even though I said goodbye to my teenhood some years ago.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Is It That Deadly?
Review: This book is fun, interesting, and mysterious all at the same time. Sarah Zoltanne, an average teenage girl, moves to a new small town with her mother, future step-father, and his daughter, Kyra. Once she is accepted in the flow of high school life, and is invited to host the fortune telling booth at a school carnival, everything is great. But when she see's images in her crystal ball, and the images become reality, people accuse her for being an evil witch. But what starts out as harmless accusations, turns to deadly foul play.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The most recent of Duncan's fabulous suspense novels
Review: Gallows Hill is the most recent of Lois Duncan's young adult suspense novels, published just when I was deciding that she was probably never going to write another one. It is one of my favorites, though I don't know if that's because I read it after reading her other books. It is the story of Sarah Zoltanne, a 17-year-old high school senior who moves to the tiny town of Pine Crest, Missouri, with her mother, who has fallen in love with Ted Thompson, a local teacher with two kids of his own. Sarah is immediately faced with the problems of starting school in a small close-knit community in her senior year, as well as dealing with two stepsiblings and being an outsider, not to mention the terrible nightmares and visions the place gives her.

Her only friend is Charlie Gorman, an overweight boy who is also an outsider in his own town. Researching the story of the Salem Witch Trials brings up terrible visions for Sarah, and the students at school terrorize her, believing that she is a witch. Eventually she realizes that she is remembering memories from a past life as nine-year-old Betty Parris, who triggered the Salem Witch Hunt 300 years earlier. Many of the students in the town, including Charlie, have been reincarnated from that lifetime, and have come together to repeat the incident as a way of teaching the lessons that people didn't quite get the first time around.

Duncan put an incredible amount of research into this book, and she does a fantastic job of weaving a fast-paced modern story with history. She even inspired me to read some other historical fiction on Salem, which is usually not something I read. Readers will share Sarah's discomfort in her brand-new stepfamily, especially with her stepsister, 16-year-old Kyra. They will also itch to throttle Eric, the smooth-talking, two-timing golden boy who convinces Sarah to tell fortunes at the school carnival.

The hardest part about Gallows Hill is knowing that Sarah is telling the truth when no one believes her. Everyone, including the principal at her school and her own mother, think she is exaggerating when she tells them about the crow left in her locker and people spying on the house. Sarah goes through this ordeal with a minimum of support - just Charlie. It can be near impossible to believe in yourself when no one else does.

The flashbacks, too, are done very well. The modern-day teenagers who have been reincarnated all play strong roles in Sarah's life, just as they did in little Betty Parris' in Salem. The final scene, when Kyra and Eric kidnap Sarah and threaten to hang her because she is a witch, is powerful and frightening. Readers will feel like they are watching the flickering fire and hearing the sound of New Age music as the students put a noose around Sarah's neck.

Duncan also pulls together some utterly beautiful writing - "It's Governor Phips, Sarah thought, hovering between lifetimes, before she realized that it was Ted Thompson who was removing the noose from her neck and lowering her into the upraised arms of her mother."

Like all of Lois Duncan's other young adult novels, this one is highly recommended.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: No more a witch than you are
Review: This is a creepy understandable modern twist on the seventeenth century Salem witch hunts.
It all starts when Sarah Zoltanne is dragged to a conservative Californian town called Pine crest where the adults are bitter and secretive and the students are rebels in disguise as sweet little church goers. Once there, Sarah is confronted with dreams from a past that is not her own and within a small paperweight visions of a future she is frightened is her own. The students become dead suspicious of her and Sarah finds herself in a tangled web of problems from the past, the fear of the future, and the confusion of the present.


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