The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
Katherine Howe
Hyperion, 2009. 371 pgs. Fiction

Do not be put off by the occasionally overwrought prose of Katherine Howe's first novel because by and by that gives way to a crackerjack of a story based on the startling premise that some of the supposed "witches" of the Salem trials were actually "cunning women" with gifts for healing, herbology, and divination, gifts which are manifest in their posterity in the latter day.
Constance (Connie) Goodwin, a graduate student studying Colonial American History at Harvard is trying to get her grandmother's home ready for sale at the same time she is being hounded by a real demon of an adviser to research and propose a dissertation topic. As Connie sorts through her grandmother's things she finds a key and a parchment fragment which hints at the existence of a physick or shadow book belonging to Deliverance Dane, an original and previously unknown source work perfect for her studies. Alternating narratives trace Connie's hunt for the book and Livvy's life in the 1690s of the Salem witch trials. Howe (herself a PhD candidate in American and New England studies) shines in the historical story and the book is filled with a fascinating wealth of information about Puritan life and thought, the politics of the past and the scholarship of the present. A slightly corny (but essential) love story rounds out this memorable tale of the crackling edge between the natural and the supernatural, and all those things that "are not dreamt of in our philosophy."

LW