A review by algauthor
Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian

3.0

Mary was not an easy character to like, or at times trust, and her voice/sensibilities came across as a little too modern, but I came to understand her by the end. Reading a fictional 17th century witch trial was as maddening as reading The Crucible in 11th grade, so no new ground was really broken here, though perhaps that was not the author's intent. While the plot felt slow at times, and the courtroom proceedings figured more prominently into the book than I expected, I very much liked how each chapter began with a quote from the trials, creating tension and driving me to read forward to see how the quote would come into play.

And WHAT. AN. ENDING.

As I was reading, I found the ending jaw-droppingly unrealistic, a complete suspension of belief, almost hilariously so. Not that it didn't appeal to my penchant for happily-ever-after. But was this too much? And I decided that it was not. Why? Because this is the ending I would have wanted for every innocent woman and man falsely accused and convicted of witchcraft and wrongfully hanged, burned, or crushed. Though pure fiction, this ending shone like a pinprick light of justice for all of those murdered souls. I wish it could have been so for each one of them. I wish that humans in power haven't always been so terrible to those they considered "beneath" them for any strange or fabricated reason.

I hope this gets an adaptation like The Flight Attendant. There's a lot in the literary canon about witch trials, but far less on the the screen.