Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she can't refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest--to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.
As the pieces of Deliverance's harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and she begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem's dark past then she could have ever imagined.
Written with astonishing conviction and grace, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane travels seamlessly between the witch trials of the 1690s and a modern woman's story of mystery, intrigue, and revelation."
The popular success of The Da Vinci Code sparked a subgenre that continues to grow by leaps and bounds, and Howe's book, in my eyes, fits right into the middle of that continuing growth. I've never been a fan, personally, of historical fiction, but in the hands of the right author, historical mysteries, especially if they involve arcane knowledge, dusty research libraries, and a touch of romance, do usually capture my attention.
For the most part, though, Howe's book is just so-so. The premise is interesting, the writing is okay, the characters are engaging....but it just lacks that something extra to get it over the hump. One of the key problems is that everything about this book is too formulaic. Within thirty pages, I knew what to expect -- everything was just too obvious, from the motivations of the secondary characters to the patterns that emerged throughout history. I'm even on the fence about the witchcraft in the book, and I'm usually extremely able and willing to suspend my disbelief for twists like this; something about it just didn't work with the main character's personality and character development, though, so it seemed "off."
One thing Howe does well is to establish an undercurrent of the relationship between mothers and daughters that serves as the backbone of the novel. Aside from the the unbalanced feel of the alternate historical perspectives, this idea is developed quite nicely through a number of scenes, including some very revealing phone conversations.
Unfortunately, there's just too much here that makes me feel like I've "been there, done that," which is unfortunate as the premise of this book shows a lot of promise. Still, Howe is a young writer, and this book does show the potential she possesses.
