Our first book that we read as a whole group - and I would call it a success.  A very dear friend of mine recommended it as something fun and lighthearted and she wasn't wrong. We time jump between 1991 with a graduate student working on her dissertation and then back to the Salem Witch Trials. The beginning reads a little campy like a mystery or innocent romance novel but after the halfway point the plot picks up speed and the ride is a lot of fun. It made me want to read more things about the Salem Witch Trials like The Crucible which I somehow missed in school, and also watch "Hocus Pocus".  Recommend it!!

B&N says ~ Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie's grandmother's abandoned home near Salem, she can't refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key secreted within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest to find out who this woman was, and to unearth a rare colonial artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge of herbs and other, stranger things.

“I am simply a 'book drunkard.' Books have the same irresistible temptation for me that liquor has for its devotee. I cannot withstand them.” ~ L.M.Montgomery