The First Witch of Boston by Andrea Catalano Review: Fact-Based Puritan Tragedy and Love Story

The First Witch of Boston is built on a documented historical case: Margaret Jones (1613–1648), the first woman tried and executed for witchcraft in Boston, hanged in June 1648. Andrea Catalano, an author with a background in history education, grounds the novel in actual diary entries and court records, then imagines the life that the record leaves blank. The book opens in 1646, when Maggie and her husband, Thomas Jones, relocate from London to the Charlestown section of Boston to build a new life among a strict Puritan community — one that, as the publisher's synopsis puts it, demands women be meek and quiet. Maggie is neither. A talented herbalist and midwife with what one reviewer describes as a contemporary woman's outlook, she chafes against the role assigned to her, and her independence becomes the seed of the accusation that will destroy her. The result is positioned as both the story of a woman unjustly accused and a love story spanning the political and social turmoil of Old and New England.

The novel's most distinctive formal choice is its structure. Margaret is already dead when the book begins: Thomas discovers the journals she kept from the time they met until her execution, and her brief first-person entries are interwoven with his third-person recollections. Through that alternating frame the narrative travels from rural Berkshire, England, to bustling London, and finally to the young port town of Charlestown, tracing roughly two decades of a marriage between two very different temperaments bound by lasting love. It is a deliberate piece of design — the reader holds the ending from page one, so the suspense comes not from whether Maggie will be condemned but from watching a community's fear, hypocrisy, petty jealousy, and superstition slowly converge on her. Readers should know going in that this is not a mystery or a thriller; it is a tragedy with its verdict printed on the cover.

The strongest praise the book has earned centers on its historical texture. A review at Readers Enjoy Authors Dreams calls it a "beautifully researched, emotionally powerful novel," singling out the period detail — the food, drink, and societal rituals of 17th-century Boston — and describing the courtroom scenes, communal suspicion, and religious hypocrisy as rendered with sustained tension. That same review frames the book as a meditation on love, courage, and the cost of being true to oneself. The author's stated reliance on diaries and court records gives the witchcraft accusation a procedural plausibility: Maggie's skills as a midwife and herbalist, her refusal to defer, and the community's anxieties are all historically legible ingredients in a witch panic, and the novel assembles them accordingly.

This is heavy reading by any measure. The novel engages with capital punishment, miscarriage, child loss, historical misogyny, and sexual trauma alongside the witchcraft charge itself — content that some readers will find powerful and others will find relentless, particularly given that the outcome is known from the start. Reception among early reviewers is genuinely positive but not uniform. Blogger Toby A. Smith found the novel "less than I had hoped," while conceding that readers with an interest in witches and their trials during Puritan times will likely enjoy it. That split is informative: the book leans hard into the intimate, domestic side of its material — the marriage, the journals, the private grief — and readers who come expecting a trial-centered drama may find the balance tilted toward the love story. Those who come for the marriage and the world, per the more enthusiastic notices, will find plenty to hold them.

Published by Lake Union Publishing in September 2025, The First Witch of Boston sits comfortably alongside the current wave of fact-based witch-trial fiction, and it earns its place through the specificity of its source material and the unusual tenderness of its central relationship. It is a strong fit for historical-fiction readers drawn to the Puritan era, for book clubs — the author maintains a press kit and schedules club visits — and for anyone interested in the Margaret Jones case itself. Readers sensitive to depictions of pregnancy loss or sexual trauma should approach with care, and those wanting a propulsive courtroom narrative should calibrate expectations. As a portrait of a real woman rescued from a one-line historical record and restored to a full imagined life, it is a serious, somber piece of work.