Happy November everyone! Having completed our October read of The Dud Avocado, we now move on to The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe. With the intriguing tagline:
A crime lost to time
A secret buried deep
One book unlocks an unimaginable truth
The Physick Book promises to be an interesting read.
Howe sets her novel in the summer of 1991 and in the late 17th century during the Salem witch trials. As the story alternates between these two time periods a connection develops for the main character, graduate student Connie Goodwin, and the accused women of 1690s Salem. A teaser for the book follows:
“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.”
Howe herself is the descendant of two women accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials, Elizabeth Proctor and Elizabeth Howe. We’d love for you to discover the mysteries of this book along with us!
