Juxtaposing past and present so that historical evil bleeds into contemporary reality is not a new concept in young adult literature. Witch-hunting, too, is a time-honoured trope; Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Celia Rees’s Witch Child and many other YA novels use it as a lens to focus themes of misogyny, collective cruelty and the policing of women’s bodies. In her debut YA novel, Laura Bates, the founder of the Everyday Sexism project, interweaves a thoroughly 21st-century phenomenon – the “slut-shaming” of a teenage girl after her boyfriend broadcasts an intimate photo of her online – with its 17th-century equivalent: a young rape victim, shamed for bearing a child out of wedlock, is condemned and executed as a witch. These may be familiar stories, but in Bates’s assured hands they feel newly forged.
After her online exposure and public excoriation, 15-year-old Anna has erased her internet presence, her old name and her old life. Traumatised and grieving for her father, who died only months ago, she’s anxious to pass unnoticed in the small Scottish village to which she and her mum have moved for a fresh start. When she unwittingly alienates school kingpin Simon Stewart, however, his malign attention jeopardises her anonymity. As the embers of old rumours flare back into furious life, Anna investigates a dark chapter of local history, the story of Maggie, a rebellious girl who caught the eye of the laird’s son – and paid dearly for it.
The Burning is filled with a sense of girls’ age-old shame and suffering, their suppressed, self-devouring anguish and their rage. Like Louise O’Neill’s novels Only Ever Yours and Asking For It, it forces the reader to confront what feels unbearable – vulnerable female flesh, exposed to unceasing scrutiny, manipulation and mockery. Moments of excruciating contemporary vindictiveness – as when as a false Facebook profile is constructed for Anna’s dead father, giving his location as “in hell” – are interwoven skilfully with analysis of historical horrors such as the ducking stool and the scold’s bridle.
Unlike O’Neill, though, Bates allows her heroine to have the last word. In a cinematically rousing culmination, Anna turns on her harassers. It is particularly satisfying that Simon, the originator, is given no arc of redemption, though the reader glimpses the nastiness of his father early on; and that the headmaster who dares to suggest that Anna’s choices somehow justified her subsequent treatment is verbally eviscerated by her furious mother. This is a hard and challenging read, but its power and necessity are impossible to deny.
• The Burning is published by Simon & Schuster (£7.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
