Note: this is not a review, just my spoiler-filled thoughts as I was reading.
It’s always frustrating when a good book goes bad. Sometimes the fault lies in a premise poorly executed (like what many people say about the 2019 movie Yesterday, though I disagree). Sometimes it’s a failure to correctly prime reader expectations (one of the trickiest and most important skills a writer must learn, in my experience). Sometimes it’s simple inconsistency in the quality of a work.
This last (and a touch of the second) comes closest to describing my feelings toward Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which I picked up at Goodwill based purely on the strength of its title and cover—a thing I almost never do, considering the tottering stack of books on my nightstand.
I was pleasantly surprised at first. The prose was sumptuously vivid, especially the author’s nuanced way of describing the movements of light and scent. The protagonist was layered and complex, her personality subtly shifting in different contexts, like a real person. The Massachusetts setting was loving realized, flavored with Dark Academia, for which I am a sucker. Most impressive of all, the colonial-era interludes felt both accessible to the modern reader and authentic in their depictions of early-modern mindsets, from the dialogue to the physical details to the belief frameworks of the POV-characters, and oh yeah did I mention the dialogue? As a writer, I had a small panic attack thinking about how much research and effort must’ve gone into it. As a reader, I immediately trusted the depth of the author’s knowledge and research, which remained consistent till the very end.
Which was a big part of the book’s biggest problem.
In comparison to these interludes, the majority of the story, set in the 1990s, felt slipshod. The prose was almost always strong, if not quite as textured as the first few chapters, but the modern dialogue was consistently ham-fisted. Almost every line was an obvious setup to deliver information to the reader, and the attempts to create distinct character voices by means of word choice and wit came across as cheesy and forced (especially true when the protag was talking to her dog/familiar with no humans present, for the obvious purpose of informing the reader).
The whole thing felt unnatural, such that I wonder if the author put all her efforts into rendering a realistic colonial setting and just assumed she could skate by with little attention to the ’90s scenes, since she’d lived through that decade. If so, the book suffered for that assumption.
The plot was nothing remarkable. I saw every major twist (save two) coming from a mile away, not that that has anything to do with the storytelling quality. Quite the reverse. You want a book like this to feel familiar, even cozy, with witches puttering around in their gardens and digging through dusty libraries, of which there were many. The first twist that surprised me—a love interest suffers a bad accident, which the protagonist must heal with witchcraft—actually felt out of place. While it deepened the stakes at a crucial story beat, and was fairly foreshadowed by other witches’ spouses suffering grim fates, the narrative never explained why this pattern persists through history, or why the protagonist was able to solve the problem with magic when her forebears, witches far more experienced and powerful than she, couldn’t do so. This plot hole distracted me at the very climax of the book.
In fact, the mere existence of that love interest was jarring—a distinctly genre-feeling plot thread in a book which had, until then, bent upscale/literary. I’ve read my fair share of romance, enough to be familiar with the conventions, such as love interests happening to bump into each other at improbably moments (like when the protagonist of this book is going for a night swim in her underwear and the guy just happens to show up).
I’d think nothing of this in an Emily Henry story, but in a tale about witches that leans literary and grounded, it felt out of place. To such an extent that I briefly suspected the love interest was in league with the antagonist, and that his showing up at overly convenient moments was an attempt to seduce information from the main character. This wasn’t the case. While I generally dislike reviews that focus on what isn’t in a story rather than critiquing what is, I think my assumption was due to author error: Katherine Howe failed to correctly prime my expectations for a conventional love story—expectations being notoriously finicky, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post (see what I did there?).
Overall, I still enjoyed the book a great deal. Worth my two bucks at Goodwill, to say the least. It pulled me along faster than most, and was a refreshing palette cleanser after the (expectantly) misogynistic and (unexpectedly) slow-paced James Bond book I tried reading (and failed to finish) just before it.
The last thing I’ll say is that the story’s feminist themes were expertly presented, in a way that was clear and nuanced but not bludgeony. The second twist that surprised me—the titular spellbook, written by a woman, had been shelved amongst Radcliffe College’s collection of cookbooks rather than in Harvard’s sepulchral rare manuscript archives—was the perfect grace note, reflecting the prejudices that women in the colonial era faced, and carrying that thread through history to the experience of women in the modern day. I also adored the layered portrayal of the Salem Witch Trials themselves: many (most?) of the people who accused women of being witches were themselves women. This was one of the only forms of hard power they could exert in their patriarchal society. The narrative also alluded to the men who were burned at the stake during the witch trials. And it explained how, despite modern scholars ascribing various social/metaphorical motivations for the panic, the people of the time were operating under the very real (to them) assumption that the accused women were, in fact, witches. Sometimes the most complicated things are also the simplest.
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane was inconsistent in quality, but still a nuanced story indeed—and if you know me, you know I’m a big fan of nuance in my books.
Luke Wildman 