Book Review: Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian

Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication Date: May 4, 2021 – that’s today!
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

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.

This is the third book I’ve read by Chris Bohjalian and I have to say, I’m impressed with his range. Most of you are probably familiar with The Flight Attendant now that it’s been made into a TV series. I’ve also read The Sandcastle Girls which is a historical novel about the Armenian Genocide. Hour of the Witch is also historical fiction but this time set in Boston, all the way back in 1662.

Mary Deerfield’s husband Thomas drinks too much, which makes him very cruel towards her, both physically and emotionally. When he stabs her hand with a fork, she decides that she can’t take it anymore and petitions to divorce him. Unfortunately, she lives in a Puritan community in 1662, where divorce is virtually unheard of. At the same time, mysterious objects found buried in Mary’s yard and other supposedly suspicious happenings leave some people wondering if Mary could be a witch.

Hour of the Witch is well-researched historical fiction. Mary’s divorce trial and the town’s treatment of her in general highlights how women were treated as second-class citizens incapable of taking care of themselves or making decisions on their own. The Puritans also held each other to suffocatingly high standards. A lot of the drama is caused by the fork. Fork seem innocuous to us today but apparently, Puritans thought they were the “devil’s tines.” The fact that Mary’s father imported some from Europe is a strike against her.

The pacing of Hour of the Witch was a little uneven. The first half was kind of slow and then the last chapter or so went at breakneck speed to wrap things up. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it. Recommended.

(I received a complimentary copy of this book for review.)