Author: Chris Bohjalian
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2022
Pages: 406
Rating: Do Not Recommend
Synopsis: 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 right to not only escape her marriage, but also the gallows.
Review: I read Secrets of Eden in 2011 and was not sure I cared to read another Chris Bohjalian novel. However, this book came up as an October suggestion and I do like this period in American history so I gave him another chance. Regrettable.
Chris Bojahlian is not an author for me, but I stuck with this book to meet a Goodreads Reading Challenge. That said, there are some takeaways. The Puritan world of the 1600s was rife with hypocrisy behind their masks of piety and religious zeal. And please, if you believe woman have it so bad in 2026, research life in Colonial America. This was a difficult novel to read, from the author's writing style to the subject matter.
Chris Bohjalian Novels
Secrets of Eden
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