As a researcher, you were destined to spend hours hunched over card catalogues to find volumes you needed in the library. The action travels back and forth 300 years, where we see bits & pieces of Deliverance’s life and the trials, and back to the current year 1991, in Connie’s life. The 1991 time frame is significant because it was a time that hovered between technologies where historical data were not yet entirely computerized. This discovery draws her deeper in the mysteries of her grandmother’s house and launches Connie on a scholarly quest that puts her education as a historian of American Colonial Life to work-to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a ‘physick’ book (also known as ‘medicine’). its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.
The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written on it: Deliverance Dane. In her preparations, she discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. Harvard graduate student, Connie Goodwin’s plans to spend the summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation are interrupted when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie’s grandmother’s abandoned home near Salem.
I enjoyed this spellbinding read about a disturbing yet fascinating time period in American history~ the Salem Witch Trials. From 1692 – 1693, 150 people were imprisoned and charged with witchcraft~ 29 convicted, of which 19 were hanged, one man crushed to death with stones, and five died while in prison.
I’m joining Jain with my Edible Book Review at Food for Thought, a delicious blog for readers with an appetite for the written word. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane **** by Katherine Howe
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