I loved this book! For all you fans of mystical realism, this is a must read. It’s the story of Connie Goodwin, a Harvard graduate student whose hippy mother asks her to clean up her grandmother’s long-empty house near Salem. When Connie goes to the house – the hidden-by-the-garden, no electricity, no phone, hundreds-year-old-house – she discovers an old key with a scrap of paper referring to Deliverance Dane. The discovery leads her on a quest to find the physick, or shadow book that was handed down from mother to daughter for several generations.
During her research, Connie meets the handsome church restorer, Sam, and develops a sweet romance. When harm befalls Sam, Connie has to find Deliverance’s book in order to save his life. That makes the last quarter of the book just fly. And we have a villain (though I figured him out long before Connie did), and an adorable (and very special) dog named Arlo.
I really like the style of Howe’s writing. She switches between Connie’s life in 1991, and the 1692-1700-something lives of Deliverance, Mercy, and Prudence (gotta love those names). Deliverance is part of the 1692 Salem witch trials (and is probably the only one of the convicted women who is an actual witch). Howe provides a great deal of well-researched history and theories about the place of women and “women’s things” in American history. At first I was confused as to why she set the story in 1991, but then it dawned on me: in 1991 the Internet didn’t exist for the masses, and almost no one had cell phones or lap tops. To find information you had to go someplace and look for information. The story wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting if Connie could have Googled Deliverance Dane on her MacBook.
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