Katherine Howe – The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

60. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe (2009)

Length: 372 pages

Genre: Fiction/Historical Fiction

Started: 15 May 2009
Finished: 17 May 2009

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane will be published by Voice on 9 June 2009; you can pre-order your copy from Amazon here. Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy to review!

Where did it come from? From the publisher.
Why do I have it? I requested it because I tend to like historical/modern fiction hybrids, plus the Salem Witch trials are super-interesting. Plus, the main character is a graduate student!
How long has it been on my TBR pile? Since 31 March 2009
Verdict? Keeper

Salem: Good story,
but what if witches were real?
Grad student finds out…

Summary: Connie Goodwin is a Harvard graduate student in early American history, poised to become the star of her department, and being pressured by her advisor to find a really unique primary source around which to base her dissertation. She has also agreed to spend the summer cleaning out her grandmother’s house in Marblehead, Massachusetts, for sale – a tiny house from the late 1600s, surrounded by an overgrown garden, and never wired for electricity. When cleaning, she discovers a key tucked into a Bible, with a scrap of paper bearing the name “Deliverance Dane” inside it. When Deliverance turns out to be the name of a previously unknown victim of the Salem Witch Trials, Connie begins to suspect that the “receipt book” mentioned in her will might not be a ledger, but rather a witch’s shadow book. Connie’s been trained to think of the Salem Witch Trials as a manifestation of social and economic forces is Puritan New England, but now she has to consider history in a different light: What if the women condemned by the trials actually were witches?

Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book from front to back. First of all, the treatment on the ARC was beautiful, rich textured paper on the fold-over cover done up to make it look like an old book. The story itself was equally wonderful, absorbing and atmospheric and drawing me through history and generations and dusty archives and stuffy New England clubs and creepy overgrown shacks in the woods at a well-measured pace. To be honest, I was predisposed to like this book, with so many of my favorite story elements: interlaced historical and modern storylines, research and following of clues through dusty archives (and a graduate student protagonist!), and a little bit of the fantastic/supernatural bleeding over into real life. Add to that a sympathetic main character, tons of well-drawn settings, an interesting premise, and equal splashes of intrigue and romance, and you’ve got me hooked.

My only real issue with this book is that it never quite managed to surprise me. Admittedly, Connie wasn’t working with the benefit of having read the back cover copy, but I still managed to arrive at most of the answers about what was going on before she did, and nothing ever happened that made me reconsider what had come before. But that’s a hard trick to pull off, and it’s hard to fault an author for putting together a story well enough that its ends follow consistently (if somewhat predictably) from its premise. I could also quibble about a couple of (very minor) plot points that were never quite resolved, and an overreliance on transliterating thick New England accents (in a few cases to the point of near-illegibility), but those are pretty minor points, and in the grand scheme of things, they affected my enjoyment of the book not at all. Once I was hooked in, nothing was going to tear me away. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: I think anyone who enjoyed The Historian, Kate Mosse’s Labyrinth, or Kathleen Kent’s The Heretic’s Daughter – or anyone who likes historical mysteries in general – will find this one an engagingly good read.

As a final note, if it is the night before a committee meeting about which you are feeling nervous (unnecessarily so, as it turns out, but you don’t know that yet), and you decide to try to calm yourself down by reading in bed for an hour, it is perhaps best NOT to pick this book up, as the entire first chapter consists of a graduate student squirming in front of her scarily imposing committee during an excruciatingly realistic depiction of qualifying exams, and this scene is not exactly soothing on the nerves. Trust me on this one.

This Review on LibraryThing | This Book on LibraryThing | This Book on Amazon

Links: Official Book Website

Other Reviews: Caribousmom, On My Bookshelf, Muse Books Reviews, In Search of Giants, Minds Alive on the Shelves
Have you reviewed this book? Leave a comment with the link and I’ll add it in.

First Line: Peter Petford slipped a long wooden spoon into the simmering iron pot of lentils hanging over the fire and tried to push the worry from his stomach.

Vocab: (see the whole list)

• p. 109: “Instead she pulled forth a tiny corn husk doll, dressed in a scrap of dimity with a faded yarn bow around its neck.” – a thin cotton fabric, white, dyed, or printed, woven with a stripe or check of heavier yarn.
  .
• p. 139: ““It’s based on a wimple, you know,” Connie said, offhand. “Or a hennin.” “What is?” he asked. “The witch hat that the little girl was wearing.”” – a conical or heart-shaped hat, sometimes extremely high, with a flowing veil or piece of starched linen about the crown, worn by women in the 15th century.
  .
• p. 193: ““A kabbalist notarikon that is thought to refer to Atah Gibor Leolam Adonai, an unspeakable name for God sometimes translated as “Lord God is eternally powerful.””” – a method of selecting a word and using each of its initial or final letters to stand for another word, forming a sentence or idea out of the words. Essentially an acronym, except you start with the word and come up with the phrase, instead of the other way around.
  .
• p. 284: ““Truth,” he repeated, pausing with significance. “In this age of relativisim and shoddy humanitarian nonsense. The hermeneutics of this, the gendering of that, discourses of the other thing.”” – the science of interpretation, esp. of the Scriptures
  .

**All quotes come from an advance review copy and may not reflect the final published text.**