I am not the first nor shall I be the last author to complain of poor treatment at the hands of a reviewer. An author and potential readers have a right to expect a reviewer to have a minimum of expertise or competence in judging the merits of the book under consideration and to put to one side all personal prejudices. I think I have a case when I say that I have not been well served by Kate Forrest.

She sets the tone of her review at the outset when she quotes one of the most vituperate accusations made at the time against the Patriotes, putting the blame for the events of 21 May 1832 squarely on their shoulders. Ms Forrest may well agree with the quotation since she states as a bald fact that Patriote supporters started a riot in the Place d'Armes, something my book was designed to disprove. Ms Forrest is entitled to believe what she likes about Montreal's past but one wonders on what evidence she relies for such a belief other than on the contradictory statements made by the officers and soldiers involved in the shooting and by the magistrates on duty on the day, the very people who had a vested interest in having people believe that a riot had occurred. Why historians since the nineteenth century and people like Ms Forrest prefer to believe the officer and the magistrate who gave the order to open fire rather than other, more credible eyewitnesses remains a real mystery. For there were many credible witnesses but their testimonies have quite simply been ignored by historians until now.

It is true that I deal exhaustively with the events of the day in question but I do not rely primarily, as Ms Forrest claims, "on government journals and newspaper editorials" but on the verbatim accounts of those eyewitnesses who were called before the House of Assembly's public enquiry. Ms Forrest also disapproves of my preference for recounting events rather than theory, but appears to understand 'theory' as meaning historical context, since she claims that I rarely step back from the day in question. In fact, my first two chapters deal with the historical context: the long drawn-out quarrel between the governor and his hand-picked Legislative Council on the one hand, and the Patriote-run Assembly on the other, and more specifically, the accusations of libel made against Daniel Tracey by the Legislative Council, its decision to imprison him and the subsequent action by members of that same council acting as Montreal magistrates in favour of Tracey's opponent. Even someone "not well-versed in Quebec history" can understand the animosity felt by those Legislative Council members when they realised that their sworn enemy was likely to win the election and possibly jeopardise their heavy financial investments in the sale of Crown Lands, points which seem to have escaped the notice of the reviewer.

Ms Forrest states that "a brief discussion of attitudes to colonial power, the emergence of the Patriote movement, or the ethnic divisions marking Montreal society," all supposedly missing from my book, would have been useful. I considered these very points essential which is why I discuss them in my first two chapters. My book is a monograph on an event that took place just five years before the 1837 Rebellion and involved a number of prominent Patriotes, yet it has been dismissed by generations of historians as insignificant and almost written out of Quebec history as the authorities of the time hoped it would be. Though I spend the final chapters of the book showing how those authorities contrived the cover-up, Ms Forrest avoids any mention of the term in her review. And contrary to what she contends at the end, I do in fact show that the general reaction in the province to the military shooting was partly responsible for drawing up the Patriotes' 92 Resolutions. It was the rejection of that document by the British in 1837 that led directly to the tragic events at the end of that year. The first requirement of a reviewer is to read the book in its entirety. On the basis of this review, Ms Forrest seems to have fallen at the first hurdle.