Books › The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
509 pages
A dual-timeline mystery steeped in the smell of old paper, hidden magic, and the lingering ghosts of New England's dark past.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like stepping into a sunlit, dust-moted archive where the past is never truly dead. It unfolds at a steady, deliberate pace, inviting you to sift through yellowed parchment, decipher colonial handwriting, and uncover secrets buried beneath centuries of historical record. The atmosphere is thick with the humid, overgrown feel of a New England summer, layered over the chilling, dread-soaked history of the Salem witch trials. It is a deeply atmospheric experience that balances scholarly research with a subtle, creeping magic. Perfect for readers who love the quiet thrill of academic discovery and the haunting weight of ancestral legacy, this book offers a grounded, deeply researched exploration of hidden female power and the enduring echoes of history.
- Mood
- dusty
- haunting
- mysterious
- academic
- Tone
- scholarly
- earnest
- atmospheric
- reverent
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- ancestral legacy · hidden female knowledge · the weight of history · academic obsession · magic as domestic survival
- The writing
- Richly descriptive and historically grounded, the prose balances scholarly precision with a creeping sense of the supernatural.
- The arc
- The journey shifts from detached intellectual curiosity to a deeply personal, haunting awakening of ancestral power.
- Who it's for
- Anyone who dreams of finding a magical artifact hidden in the dusty archives of a university library or an abandoned colonial home.
Content notes
- historical misogyny
- execution by hanging
- witch trials
About the book
A spellbinding, beautifully* written novel that moves between contemporary times and one of the most fascinating and disturbing periods in American history--the Salem witch trials.
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.
This description comes from the 2009 Voice hardcover edition.
Description from Open Library.
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