A new twist on an old history

In 1692, cunning woman Deliverance Dane was one of the victims of the Salem Witch Hunts, accused for the death of a young girl by her father. Years after Deliverance's death by hanging, her daughter Mercy attempts to clear Livvy's name, something which had been granted to the other condemned men and women. However, the presiding judge states that Deliverance was not and cannot be cleared as she actually was guilty of witchcraft.

Flash forward to 1991: Connie Goodwin is about to embark on the final stages of her graduate studies at Harvard. However, first she must deal with her deceased grandmother's old, decrepit house. Connie, for years submerged in academia, get distracted her discoveries in the house, including the mystery of an old key in a Bible, wrapped in a delicate paper with the name Deliverance Dane written on it. She uses her research skills to track down Dane's story, at the encouragement of her advisor, Manning Chilton, who may have alterior motives. During her investigation, Connie ends up not only learning about Deliverance's story, but her own.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane is Katherine Howe's first fiction release, and mirrors aspects of the author's life: both have ancestors involved with the Salem Witch trials, both are dog lovers, both were/are graduate students at Harvard. But Howe's writing style is not bogged down in multisyllabic, academic, incomprehensible language. Rather, it is an intelligent but fluid text, its imagery often sublimely beautiful (Connie "was always puzzled that people say that darkness falls. To her it seemed instead to rise, massing under trees and shrubs, pouring out from under furniture, only reaching the sky when the spaces near the ground were full"). Howe successfully portrays Massachusetts in time periods separated by three centuries, with empathy, pathos, and humour (my favourite scenes being the comical portrayal of strict librarians, and of someone's shouting entering Connie's sleeping subconscious in Sans Serif script, not to mention Connie's new age mother). Without giving anything away, the unconventional ending may throw some readers off, but I found it to be a different, and who knows, perhaps plausible conclusion. And I look forward to more of Howe's work.