Nothing funny about feldspar

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe.

Am I the only person who found the academic relationships in this book so distracting as to make the thing unreadable? It’s a fluffy book, with lots of characters expositing so the reader is as smart as they are about Colonial American history, and specifically the practice and fear of witchcraft about the time of the Salem Trials. But the problem is, by trying to make the reader smarter, Howe makes the characters just seem dumb.

For example, the protagonist, Connie, is a Harvard PhD candidate who has just passed her orals in Colonial American History. I infer, then, that she has taken a lot of classes in Colonial American History (likely some of them specialized to the point of absurdity). In one scene, she’s reading a Probate document for a woman (Deliverance Dane) who she later decides is probably an undiscovered Salem witch. One of the listed items is a “receipt book.” It only took dear Connie half a page to figure out that “receipt” is not about running a store, but is a “recipe” book. Has Connie never taken a class in the domestic life of America? There were certainly plenty of books published before 1991 using the word “Receipts” where today we might use “Recipes”. And yes, I’m aware that Amazon.com wasn’t around then, but she’s at Harvard. They have a big library. Worse even, is that later as she’s discussing this with her advisor, she has to explain to him the transition from “receipt” to “recipe”.

Later, in another character’s diary from the 1700’s, she reads that “the Almanack” was given to somebody, and then proceeds to annoy us for I don’t know how many pages because I stopped reading before she figures out that “the Almanack” and the “Receipts” book are the same thing. I didn’t last long enough to know for sure because of this:

Connie has a meeting with another mentor, who is describing a paper given by Connie’s advisor at a conference only year before now, and Connie had no fucking idea that her advisor gave a paper nor its content. That was the last straw.

I’ll probably skip to the end and see how Mary Sue, er, Connie manages to come into her true powers and save the world. But unless you or any one you’ve ever known has never been in academia, or unless you have a higher tolerance for stupid “smart” people than I do, I don’t recommend the book. Or maybe you should just skip the bits with Connie. Nah. Don’t bother. Just read some of the glowing reviews to get the good bits of the story.

Edited to add: Ok, so I did finish it, and I’d like to revise my response a little. It was a pretty good story — not as inventive as some of the reviews would have you believe; if you’ve ready *any* urban fantasy or *any* witchy novels, it’s pretty familiar ground. There were some moments when it seemed as though there was an adult, literate novel trying to get through the fluff. Too many “details” seemed to be important, but then they were never used again. As a mystery, it wasn’t much of one. As a thriller, it wasn’t much of one. As a romance, it defintely wasn’t much of one. As historical fiction, that wasn’t too bad, but it was history-lite, much like you’d get in a middle-school book. As a feminist tome, it could have been so much more, but the protagonist only gets a little peeved once while her advisor calls her “my girl” over and over. As a story of academia it was laughable. All in all, I wish Ms Howe would have picked one genre and really stuck with it. I felt she continually took the easy way out, the fluff over the substance, like deciding to make a cake all out of different kinds of frosting with a few raisins tossed in. (For the record I dislike raisins. In this metaphor, raisins are the academic bits.)

On the plus side, Ms Howe gives Connie a wonderful interior vision (undoubtedly we are supposed to decide her facility with imagining what people are doing is related to her powers), and writes well enough to make me finish the book, even though I threw it away in the middle in disgust.