The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane – Katherine Howe

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane flips back and forth between modern Massachusetts and the Salem Witch Trials. When Connie’s mother calls and asks her to clean out her grandmother’s old house so it can be repossessed, Connie, a doctoral candidate, gives up her summer to clean out the old house. Connie discovers an old bible with a key and a note with the words “deliverance dane” inside of it. Weird things start happening and her advisor starts acting strange and now Connie has to figure out what is going on. 

This book is hard to recommend in all honesty. The main character struck me as terribly incompetent for who she was supposed to be. She was a doctoral candidate in colonial history who seemed to know nothing of her family from that era, how to research anything or even realize that most people of the time were functionally illiterate and often spelled things phonetically. Plus some things just didn’t make sense. Connie’s mother owned a house since Connie was four or five, was a single mother, and didn’t mention it once or pay taxes on it for 20 plus years and it’s only being repossessed now? Connie’s weird, obsessed advisor/professor taught her for at least two years and didn’t see fit to even hint that Connie should look into her family history during the time period she was supposed to be an expert in yet knew all about it? Seriously, can we say psycho stalker? Connie dates a guy for about a month and suddenly he’s “cursed” and some random recipe in her many times great grandmother’s book is the only thing that can save him, really? It started out as a decent contemporary fiction novel and then tries to become a paranormal thriller. The transition did not work very well. There were so many other places the author could’ve taken the story. The flash backs to the colonial era were interesting but that’s about all I can say this book had going for it. All in all it just comes down to the fact that the characters are unlikeable and nonsensical and it really diminishes the storytelling for me. Library rental at best.