Really, not that great a book. The idea is excellent: a young man living during the time of the American Revolution, caught up in love with a young woman of higher means whose father serves the Crown. His pull is towards the new Republic and he is a Minute Man. And he also lives during a time when magic is suspect so he must hide his talents from the world around him. All very plausible and a good story line.

But Finlay gets bogged down in too many details about way too much: the Revolutionary War (starting with the Battle of Lexington and Concord), how magic works, how Proctor Brown's mother won't teach him how to use his talents, how other magic workers use theirs, the proximity in time to the Salem Witch Trials, and how young Proctor feels about everyone.

The characters are not sharply delineated, making the actions they take motivated by something that we will soon learn about. Later. Or maybe at the end. Or maybe it was mentioned a while back. It feels like Finlay wants to put forward his knowledge of the time period, which is extensive, but with a good editor it could have expanded one of the stories and kept the remaining story lines as either separate novels or more concise. ( )

Quick review for RWB Read-a-thon, more to come.

Witchcraft underlies events that begin the Revolutionary War. A young militiaman seeks to learn more about his own powers and becomes enmeshed in magic much larger than he ever realized existed.

I have mixed feelings on this one. I love the idea of magic being involved in the time period, when witchcraft was viewed with grave fear, but just didn't bond too well with the characters. ( )

We readers all have peculiar tastes.

One of the peculiarities of my taste is that I tend to dislike "alternate histories." Having to imagine that the Sourth won the Civil War and then Hitler migrated there in 1918 so the Germans were really the good guys in WWII...just seems too high a toll to pay before I even get in to the story.

And I have an equal prejudice against "epic historical fantasies" (of the type typified by Guy Gavriel Kay) where the setting is really (pick one) Renaissance Italy / 12th Century France / 5th Century Byzantium, except all the names are changed and magic really works! My feeling about these books is always, Why not just set the story there and then?!!

Which is why--and it is a peculiarity of my taste--I really do like historical fantasies set in this consensus reality, where real historical people and events appear on stage, and where magic is a secret shadow hovering at the fringes and in some way influenciing the history we all know.

All of which is a long way of explaining why I really liked The Patriot Witch.

Our hero, Proctor Brown is an all-American 20-year old in 1775 Massachusetts: tall, strong, handsome and hardworking. All he wants is to marry his pretty girlfriend and have her rich father help set him up for a prosperous life. While his sympathies are with the Colonists, he drills as a Minute Man only from a sense of neighborhly duty: he doesn't really expect a shooting war.

But next thing he knows he's on the Green at Lexington, a neighbor's shot dead beside him, and the Revolution has begun. Yet the war is the least of his problems, because Proctor is also the child of a witch with certain secret talents of his own. His quest to understand this hidden world to which he belongs, while the mundane world is exploding around him, makes for thrilling adventure.

The characters are varied and strong; the magic is plausibly-presented and nicely underplayed (well, except maybe for the spine-tingling zombie scene); and the plot and pacing are flawless. I espcecially liked one of the villains, an evil witch straight out of Hansel and Gretal.

Finlay's prose is also mostly good--workmanlike and polished. Only once or twice per chapter does it fall into anachronistic phrasings or bits of dialog with no place in the 18th Century. These lapses jarred me and made me nostalgic for the historical times I still remember, when novels still had editors.

But I carp too much. Overall, this is an exciting highly entertaining read that left me eager for the sequel.

( )

Tedious. Imagine if the there were witches in the Revolutionary War, and those witches were on both sides, controlling things through subtle magic - debilitating spells, artifacts of protection, and conspiracies with leaders. This book has three parts - the Shot Heard Round the World, exile at a farm full of witches, and the Battle of Bunker Hill.

The problem is that it's filled with descriptions of the battle, through the eyes of the main character. You can tell the author is a historian with a lot of junk knowledge he/she wants to take out and demonstrate. There's a lot of people moving around, getting shot, and I don't care about anyone. I just can't work with descriptions of war battles. I need a single character moving through plots and revelations.

The other problem is that the witchcraft works when it wants to - there are no rules and no flash. It's nothing special. I was imagining witches on broomsticks flying over Lexington and Concord, shooting spells at British witches, while a battle of mortals raged on below them. But it's nothing like that. It's more like some poor schmoe finds out he's magical, has to go join some other bitchy witches, bonds with them, mentor dies, and he must go into battle and redeem himself. ( )

Finally got around to reading this- bought it quite a while ago on someone's recommendation. It sounded interesting and it sort of was, but somehow it didn't engage me. I had no strong sense of the characters and they seemed to be walking through their plot and their lines. For me, the main character's relationship with his mother was erratic and unclear.

The setting was interesting - the revolutionary war, but I was also somewhat thrown by the author's failure to correctly render Quaker "plain speech" (Wikipedia covers this correctly so it isn't that hard to find "their usage was also grammatically distinctive, saying "thee is" instead of "thou art", a holdover from a dialect formerly common in the north of England.")

There also seemed to be a sudden "vast conspiracy" popping up toward the end, without a lot of justification.

It was a perfectly competent and pleasant book and I may buy more in the series. But I may not. ( )