Wishy-Washy

Was I ever wishy-washy about The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe. I picked it up since it was in the must-read pile, and I was in the mood for some historical fiction.

In case you haven't heard from the huge marketing campaign, this novel is the story of a young woman named Connie working on her Ph.D. in American history at Harvard who spends her summer alternately looking for a dissertation topic and cleaning up her maternal grandmother's home near Salem, MA. The house is perfectly creepy and old, without electricity or a phone line. Connie comes across an old key in the house with a slip of paper attached reading 'Deliverance Dane'. Connie sets off to figure out who Delivance was and has a relatively easy time tracking her down and obtaining information about her descendants. Scattered throughout the novel are chapters that reveal what happened in the past from the perspective of Deliverance and her descendants. Howe's idea was apparently to write a novel from the idea of 'what if the witches from Salem were actually practicing witchcraft' thus the story takes an odd magical turn about halfway through that I wasn't expecting.

So how was I wishy-washy? Well, when I was awake and alert I thought this was an okay read. I really thought the premise was interesting and enjoyed reading about the big old house and its secrets. The Postscript was fascinating and it's obvious there and throughout the book that Howe is a scholar of American History.

But when I was tired, and it was the end of the day, I felt very nit picky about this book. My main problem with it was that the dialogue felt heavy. Too much description of how people said things, or what they were doing when they said it that didn't pertain to the continuation of the storyline. I've found that I prefer books that are just told, not just 'he said'/'she said' all the way through. In addition, I had trouble reading the New England dialect that Howe uses occasionally and had to actually read aloud to figure out what was being said.

The characters often seemed overwritten, like caricatures of people. The innocent student, the bad-boy painter romantic interest, the hippy-dippy mother who is all knowing, and the villain. Connie wasn't the easiest character to like. For a Ph.D. student she took an awfully long time (20 pages) to pick up on clues that I noticed immediately. In addition, from the moment The Villain was introduced it was as though Howe was throwing stuff at me to let me know that he was The Bad Guy. So how did Connie not notice?

{Insert big sigh.}

I know it sounds like I didn't like this book at all, which isn't the case. It's just that this, for me, was an okay book that could have been great, with better execution and more editing. I'm sure there are going to be a lot of people who enjoy this novel. I guess I just read enough to know that it could have been so much better.

Many thanks to Hyperion for this review copy.