For one, she comes to discover that she is the descendent of Deliverance Dane, one of the women accused of witchcraft in 1692. Even as Connie is busy acing her oral exams and getting ready to move on to her dissertation, Grace has a favor to ask: Would Connie mind spending the summer in the old seaside town of Marblehead, Mass., helping to domesticate the rustic (really rustic – there’s no electricity and Connie has to hack her way through vines to find the front door) former home of her grandmother?Ĭonnie grudgingly accedes, little guessing what adventures will unfold for her once she leaves Cambridge. Grace, however, isn’t as willing to let go. She doesn’t have much of a social life but she sure knows her way around a card catalog and works hard to ensure that her tidy, organized life as an academic will remain distant from that of the hippie-dippie lifestyle of her New Age-y mother, Grace. So begins The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, a debut novel in which author Katherine Howe blends the history of the long-ago witch trials with the tale of a 1991 Harvard student to create a toothsome smoothie of a summer read.Ĭonnie is an earnest, devoted scholar of American Colonial history working on her PhD at Harvard University. And she does – little knowing how far that leap will take her. Jump through the hoop, she tells herself. Manning Chilton, asking the question, so answer she must. But this is her academic adviser, the venerable Prof. No, graduate student Connie Goodwin has never entertained the possibility that the women on trial in Salem, Mass., in 1692 were really witches.

It seems an odd and disturbing question, particularly coming from a renowned Harvard scholar: “Have you not considered the distinct possibility that the accused were simply guilty of witchcraft?”

The physick book of deliverance dane