the physick book of deliverance dane review

Last summer, I vacationed in Boston, MA, and took a day trip to Salem with my boyfriend. Spanning the Witch Trial days and the decades that followed in conjunction with present day, she webs together a cunning woman of the 1600’s with a 1990’s stressed out student!

Howe states the characters in her book are not autobiographical, but they are well developed nonetheless, and she herself is descended from two Salem Witch historical figures: Elizabeth Proctor, who survived, and Elizabeth Howe, who did not. Every day she would walk her dog on the trails between Salem and Marblehead, Massachusetts, the cities the book takes place in. The book is a fascinating read, imagined by the author through her own dissertation work at Boston University. She moves to the house in the summer to clean it up and sell it, but what Connie doesn’t know is that this house will unlock a secret in history dating all the way back to the Salem Witch Trials. Our book for June was The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe.Ĭonnie, a graduate student trying to survive her oral exams, inherits (of sorts) a dusty, dirty old house that belonged to her grandmother. This description comes from the 2009 Voice hardcover edition.I’m having such fun with this book club I joined. Written with astonishing conviction and grace, *The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane* travels seamlessly between the witch trials of the 1690s and a modern woman's story of mystery, intrigue, and revelation. This discovery launches Connie on a quest-to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.Īs the pieces of Deliverance's harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and she begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem's dark past then she could have ever imagined. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she can't refuse. Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. ***A spellbinding, beautifully* written novel that moves between contemporary times and one of the most fascinating and disturbing periods in American history-the Salem witch trials.**

The physick book of deliverance dane review