Main Characters: Connie, Sam, Deliverance Dane

Summary:

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.

Anna’s Thoughts

This book is, if nothing else, very descriptive. And that is not a good thing in this case. Don’t get me wrong, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane was wonderful, it was amazing, but at points all I could think about was: I don’t want to know every little thing Connie does, or the color of the spider tangled in the dust on the ceiling. Which, they never mention, but as an example I am honestly surprised that wasn’t mentioned, that’s how detailed this book is. Details can be good, but too many can also be bad, because you get lost in them. There were a few times when reading The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane that there were 2-3 pages of Connie detailing something and when I got back to what Connie was actually doing I was completely lost because we had just went through so much detail, I had no idea where we left off and found myself having to retrace back to whatever she was doing before she started describing. The book is roughly 384 pages long, but it seemed like it could have easily been 250-300 without actually losing anything.

Also, it sort of felt like it was a ‘smart persons’ book. Which sounds.. insulting in a way, but is the only way that I can find to describe it. There is a lot of talk of school and dissertations, and all that good stuff a college-going student might know and/or care about. However, I am not a college student, I have never been a college student, and quite frankly I couldn’t care less about school, so in that way I wasn’t able to connect with the book. I wasn’t particularly interested in how Connie did with her dissertation, or if she managed to impress her professor. Also, I had to actually stop and look words up because I didn’t know the meaning to them. Some of them, my sister didn’t even know the meaning for, and if you know her, her vocabulary and just general knowledge of words is completely beyond anything I’ve seen in anyone else I’ve EVER known, so her not knowing what something means is extremely rare.

Having said that though, I really did love the story! I loved the plot and the characters, and the revelations that Connie went through to find out what she did about her past and her link to the Witch Trials. I loved hearing about the places that Connie visited in Salem, including the ice cream shop where I so would have not been as patient with the girl as Connie was! When she described the houses or buildings, and surroundings of the town I really got taken in, and it’s now a mission in my life to visit Salem in the next few years! And Sam. Oh, Sam. It’s so nice to -for once in a long time- read a book that isn’t revolving around some type of forbidden love. Or love in general for that matter. But when Sam enters the story, it was always in the back of my mind no matter what Connie was doing: Where is Sam? What’s Sam doing? And Sams parents? I think the fact that they called her helped show what type of guy Sam was as well for obviously having mentioned her to them, and I was so glad that we got that little bitty glimpse into him and what he felt for Connie.

I also love, love, loved the flash backs to the Witch Trial Salem, and seeing the life that Katherine dreamed up for Deliverance! Very few authors can actually make you feel like you’ve been transported back into time, but Katherine does a wonderful job of it! The only thing that I don’t agree with in this aspect of what we see in the past, is what happens to Deliverance, as Katherine herself -with her multitude of knowledge and research- has said, was the exact opposite of what actually happened. I am not a fan of muddling past FACTS to fit your own purpose, fiction or not.

So in general, a little too detailed at times for my liking, and it might benefit you to have a very large vocabulary if you read it, but a VERY good and captivating story full of magic, love and well.. witches. Real or not? Guess you’ll have to read to find out!