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This charming novel is both a tale of New England grad-student life in 1991 and the Salem witch hunts in 1692. The year 1991 is important because historical data were not yet entirely computerized; if you were a university researcher, your destiny was to spend hours hunched over card catalogs. And cell phones, though extant, were owned by few. It was a time when we hovered between technologies. A little like the 1690s, when we were certainly past the Dark Ages, but the scientific method was not yet widespread.
In 1991, Connie Goodwin is a graduate student at Harvard in American Colonial studies. She’s embedded in that life, living in student housing with her best friend, Liz. She prods and bullies Thomas, her anxiety-ridden protégé, and she is, in turn, under the thumb of an intolerable professor, Manning Chilton. He is her graduate adviser and should be on her side, but even as she passes her oral examination, which will advance her to candidacy for her doctorate, he begins to nag her to come up with a suitable dissertation topic.
Non-academic life intervenes. Connie’s mother, Grace, an aging hippie, phones to say that her own mother’s house in Marblehead, Mass., must be sold to pay back property taxes. Could Connie please go up there and get it ready for sale? Connie is exasperated, but she complies.
The house is hidden from view, lost in shrubbery. (Her dog, Arlo, an important character in this story, is the one who finds it.) The place is a 200 years old, at least, and sports a fireplace that doubled as a stove in days past, fitted out with iron bars designed to hang kettles and cauldrons on. The garden is overrun with rank herbs. Arlo happily brings in a dirt-clumped mandrake root, generally used for casting deadly spells. Spooky!
The first night there, unable to sleep, Connie creeps downstairs to look through shelves of old books. The Bible she’s holding springs open, giving her something like a nasty electric shock, and a key falls out, with the name Deliverance Dane written on a rolled piece of paper. What can this possibly mean? Connie vows to find out.
Meanwhile, we’ve been following the back story of the real Deliverance Dane in the 1680s and ’90s, as she lives the life of a quiet but accomplished village woman, very skilled in healing the sick, but racking up more than her share of enemies.
It’s worth saying here that the author, Katherine Howe is a descendant of two women who endured the Salem panic of 1692. Her central thesis in this novel (if a pleasant thriller can be said to have a thesis), is that, while we may think of the witch hunts as symbolic of the decline of the Puritan theocracy or as a cultural shiver between the age of superstition and the Age of Enlightenment, the good folk of Salem thought they were hunting real witches.
I liked this book very much, but I want to ask the author’s editor to please, in the future, keep her from wrapping or folding her characters’ arms around their middles. And also point out that Connie’s shoulder bag gets dropped on the floor so often it begins to sound like a character itself. But these are minor complaints. And by the end of this book, as any graduate student should, Katherine Howe has filled us in on much more than we used to know about that group of unfortunate women who paid the price of their lives due to a town’s irrational fears.
