Sunday, July 12, 2009

The Lost Book of Salem


Author: Katherine Howe Publication Date: 2009 Category: Fiction Who'll want to read it? Those interested in witches and history, particularly American Colonial history. Point of no return: When the two parts of the story link up for the first time on pages 63 and 64. A key falls out of an old bible, and it has a tiny piece of paper rolled inside it: "On it, in a watery ink barely legible in the flickering light, were written the words Deliverance Dane." What's it all about? Connie Goodwin is a PhD student at Harvard, spending the summer cleaning out her grandmother's old house near Salem, which leads to researching Deliverance Dane for her dissertation topic. Deliverance is a cunning-woman, a witch, in the 1690s, at the time of the infamous Salem witch trials. The past and the present seem interwoven as Connie continues her research, and she starts to develop the rather novel idea that for some, witchcraft is just a part of everyday life. Publisher: Penguin

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