The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

  By Katherine Howe.  It's the Barnes and Noble recommend for this month, and something I got from BEA, so I hurried to get through it.  Now that I've finished it, I wish I hadn't hurried.   I did love this book (not always the case with Barnes and Noble recommends, as the our customers and the other booksellers are aware, really? Sandra Dalles last time? Ick).  But this one.  This is the kind of book they should be picking (in my opinion).  This is Howe's first book, she's a friend of Matthew Pearls (which made me more eager to read this book), and it's unique.  It deals with a Grad student working on her dissertation while trying to clean out her grandmothers house, and finding Deliverance Dane's (a woman tried and convicted during the Salem Witch Trials) possible spell book.  None of these are new topics for fiction, but Howe takes the interesting angle of asking, what if the women convicted were really witches?  She researched the hell out of the historical aspects her of novel, making the Salem witch trials come to life as told by one of the witches.  Connie, the present day women working on her dissertation, is interesting, funny and has a cute dog (I like stories with cute dogs), and her New Agey mother is actually funny.  This was a great book, if you like interesting historical fiction, switching back and forth from history to present day (which actually bothers a lot of people), magic and strong female characters.