This story is set in Boston in 1662 and follows a young Puritan woman - Mary - as she struggles to find a happy life. Mary is the second wife to Thomas who owns the local mill. He's an upstanding member of the community and their life together started off well enough. However, Thomas is becoming increasingly violent toward Mary and as much as she would like to leave this situation, there are laws to be followed. Mary is set on navigating the complex waters of being an independent woman in 1662 but whispers of witchcraft follow her. Mary must fight to be free from Thomas, free from the gallows, and possibly free of Boston forever.
TW/CW: domestic violence
This was a really interesting genre mashup of a book - historical fiction / domestic thriller / courtroom drama. Historical fiction isn't really a go-to genre for me so I was really drawn in by the thriller and courtroom aspects. I think Bohjalian does a good job of balancing the different aspects of the story. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, Bohjalian gives a list of his research materials into 17th century America, law, and the court system. I'm no historian, so I can't say if every single detail is accurate, but there wasn't anything out of place that stuck out to me as a reader. The narration style was a little more modern than the dialogue, but not in a jarring way. It seemed like Bohjalian (and/or his editor) did a good job making sure to leave out any modern phrases or names for things. The dialogue uses a lot of 'thine', 'thee', 'thy', etc type of language that did take some getting used to. Since historical fiction isn't my usual genre, I don't know if this is a normal language choice for books set this far back in time, but it certainly made for an atmospheric read. I wasn't quite sure how I felt about this dialogue choice at the beginning, but after a few chapters, I had gotten used to it and it didn't slow down my reading or lessen my enjoyment at all.
I really enjoyed the characters in this story and thought they were pretty well developed. It really felt like the reader was just dropped into the story one day and started following Mary around from there. We don't get a whole lot of backstory about the character relationships upfront other than the literal connections (X person is married to Y or A is best friends with B, etc). But as the story develops and Mary interacts with more people, the backstory slowly comes out in dialogue or Mary thinking back to how things used to be a few years ago. I think this is especially well done considering the amount of small town gossip and rumors that were just a matter of life back then. I really liked how Mary would be thinking about how things would come across to anyone who might be watching and then, later, uses that to her advantage. There were a number of times where someone who Mary considered as a friend would be in on the gossip and might even believe the gossip to be true over what Mary would say. I wish there would have been more of this gossip revolving around less serious situations or accusations such as maybe someone buying something unusual at the market or something. I found all the connections and interpersonal dynamics fascinating. I loved the role that family played in the story - both for character development as well as plot. There's a big emphasis on family dynamics and family lines in this story. Mary, being Thomas's second wife, is much younger than him and actually around the same age as his daughter from his first marriage. Mary remarks toward the beginning of the book how difficult she found that dynamic of basically having to 'mother' a peer. We also have Mary's parents in town and her father owns a respected shipping business that brings all sorts of goods from Europe and the Caribbean.
Where I felt the book fell flat for me was the romance element. Mary meets a new person in town one day and they have a very lightly flirtatious and brief conversation in town. Later, when Mary is working through the divorce process, she thinks about how her life could be with this other man. This person becomes pretty integral to the plot later on and while Mary's feelings for him grow, I just didn't get enough of their interactions together to really believe she would fall that hard for this man. Now, I do understand that this book being set amongst 1662 Puritans means I'm not going to get the very direct and explicit flirting I get when I read contemporary romance but I just wanted some more conversations, maybe a brief hand holding when he's helping her down some steps or something like that. I also would have liked his character to be a bit more developed which could have also been done through more conversations together.
I think Bohjalian does a really great job at slowly building up the atmosphere and tension throughout the book. There isn't much by way of action in this story, but there's a lot of smaller events that all culminate at the end. I think the tension works really great in the courtroom scenes, especially. We get all this buildup of each party gathering their witnesses and accounts before the trial, the whispers of the townspeople as Mary tries to go about her normal business, and then everyone is in one building together and the trial begins. I did find the trial preparation sections to be a bit slow, but the actual trial made up for that and it was nice to have the sort of background information from all those previous scenes. Mary is the center of 2 trials in this book and I think the courtroom suspense parts of this book are the real highlight. Since we are only following Mary's story, it is really easy to get emotionally invested in the trial outcome. As much as we're rooting for her to come out on top, the reader knows that many of these types of trials did not work out in the woman's favor so we know the outcome could go either way. I found the domestic thriller aspects to be pretty light so most of the drama and thrills for me came via the courtroom scenes.
Overall, a really well balanced genre mashup of a story. Engaging characters, interesting courtroom drama, and a good amount of ye old dialogue for atmosphere.
Thanks to NetGalley and DoubleDay Books for the ARC in exchange for review
Expected publication date is May 4, 2021
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