Item: Hour of the Witch
Rating: 4.00
Author: quirkycat

by Chris Bohjalian

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of The Flight Attendant: “Historical fiction at its best…. The book is a thriller in structure, and a real page-turner, the ending both unexpected and satisfying” (Diana Gabaldon, bestselling author of the Outlander series, The Washington Post).

A young Puritan woman—faithful, resourceful, but afraid of the demons that dog her soul—plots her escape from a violent marriage in this riveting and propulsive novel of historical suspense.

Boston, 1662. Mary Deerfield is twenty-four-years-old. Her skin is porcelain, her eyes delft blue, and in England she might have had many suitors. But here in the New World, amid this community of saints, Mary is the second wife of Thomas Deerfield, a man as cruel as he is powerful. When Thomas, prone to drunken rage, drives a three-tined fork into the back of Mary's hand, she resolves that she must divorce him to save her life.

But in a world where every neighbor is watching for signs of the devil, a woman like Mary—a woman who harbors secret desires and finds it difficult to tolerate the brazen hypocrisy of so many men in the colony—soon becomes herself the object of suspicion and rumor. When tainted objects are discovered buried in Mary's garden, when a boy she has treated with herbs and simples dies, and when their servant girl runs screaming in fright from her home, Mary must fight to not only escape her marriage, but also the gallows.

A twisting, tightly plotted novel of historical suspense from one of our greatest storytellers, Hour of the Witch is a timely and terrifying story of socially sanctioned brutality and the original American witch hunt.

Look for Chris Bohjalian's new novel, The Lioness!

The paranormal meets historical fiction in Chris Bohjalian's Hour of the Witch, a thrilling tale of one woman's fight for survival.

The year is 1662, Boston. Mary Deerfield is the wife of Thomas Deerfield, a cruel and brutal man. One night Thomas takes his cruelty too far, forcing Mary to decide that she must divorce him to save her life.

However, she lives in a time when it doesn't take much to be accused of being a witch. Suddenly, instead of fighting for freedom, she's fighting for her life as the village turns against her.

“I have heard it argued that prayer does not change God’s mind; rather, it changes us.”
“The act.”
“Yes, the act.”
“I will ponder that idea.”

In many ways Hour of the Witch feels like the perfect Salem Witch Trial novel. It shows how easily people turned on one another. I was going to add back then to the end of that sentence, but I have changed my mind on that.

Bohjalain perfectly captures the horrifying brutality that comes with societal pressure, and the pain that can so easily be inflicted from one human to another. There's cruelty in the casualness of it all, and especially in the supposedly intimate acts, such as a husband being allowed to beat his wife in that era.

I really enjoyed Mary's character, and I think that made everything that happened here all the more horrifying because of it. We never want to see people suffer – especially when they're people we care about.

Overall, this is a good – yet very intense – read. If you love reading about this time period then I imagine you will thoroughly enjoy this read.

Thanks to Doubleday Books and #NetGalley for making this book available for review. All opinions expressed are my own.

Read more reviews at Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks

Hour of the Witch

by Chris Bohjalian

Reviewed by Quirky Cat on Jun 28, 2021

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