The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter
"Stellar historical fiction imbued with a rich sense of place."
-- Alida Becker, New York Times Book Review, 2/9/25
At the age of sixty-one, Judith Shakespeare, a midwife-apothecary and the twin of the long dead Hamnet, must flee provincial Stratford on horseback to avoid arrest for witchcraft. Her traveling companions are a zealous Puritan woman and a child who have been displaced by civil war -- the bloody seventeenth-century strife between Royalists and Roundheads. Judith is also leaving her marriage, which has foundered since the wrenching loss of two adults sons of plague.
The sequel to the author's My Father Had a Daughter, a tale of Judith in her youth, The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter revisits this character for the ages -- Shakespeare's sharp-tongued, witty youngest child, no less feisty in her maturity. Four hundred years after Judith's death, Grace Tiffany brings her back onto center stage. Judith's new tale offers profound insights -- into friendship, motherhood, marriage, religious extremism, and war -- that remain resoundingly true today.
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