Grad school is not interesting.

Dear Bloggy Blogter,

Apparently it was not enough that I was forced to read Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” in my sophomore year English class. No, someone out there thought, “Gee! There isn’t enough boring books written about the Salem witch trials! I need to write one more!!!”

That someone was Katherine Howe, author of “The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane,” which in my opinion is the second most boring book about the Salem witch trials ever written.

‘But Steinho,’ you ask. ‘For a subject matter so tragic and violent and full of witches, how can this book be boring?’

Well, I’ll tell you, dear readers. It’s because it’s not about witches really. It’s about a girl writing a paper on witches. A PhD candidate looking for a lost book of spells to 1. Make an academic career for herself. 2. Please her crotchety Bostonian advisor who has an accent like Katherine Hepburn, and C. Save her artsy boyfriend’s life who she just met. Not once does it occur to our heroine that maybe it might just be cool to find a book about magic… simply because magic is cool. Not a chance, Steinho. This is Academia. A book written by a history grad student…. About a history grad student! This book is about as much fun as watching someone take an oral qualifying exam for grad school. Oh wait, that actually happens in the second chapter. Thrilling!

It’s like when you ask a friend how their day was, just to be polite, but then they go into a long, drawn out epic about the various trifling obstacles that complicated their journey to complete an otherwise mundane tasks, and by the end you really wonder why you bothered opening your mouth in the first place. That is this book in a nutshell.

The only thing that made this book interesting was picturing the villain, the previously mentioned evil Professor Chilton Manning, as being played by Christoph Waltz from “Inglorious Basterds.” By the way, this Professor is evil because he knows alchemy and magic are real and he wants Connie (the heroine) to find her grand mamma’s spell book so he can steal it and make the philosopher’s stone. Wow, did you come up with that plot line all by yourself? Or did we simply fall asleep reading the first Harry Potter book? Methinks the latter!

Deliverance Dane is the sort of literary self-gratification that so offends my creative mind. Back when I was studying pagan religion in undergrad, I would have loved to discover a hidden ability to shoot magic blue beams out of my hands or find I was secretly the great-great-great grand daughter of Joan of Arc or Morgan la Fey. Especially since that would mean I was either part French or related to King Arthur. But you don’t see me going around writing a book about every sleep deprived fantasy I concoct while studying for my Comp. Lit class on Arthurian Chronicles through the ages. That would just be lame.

Well, except for maybe that fantasy I had where Arthur and Lancelot are two buddy cops, patrolling the mean streets of Camelot, and Merlin was a crack addict lacing his drugs with real magic dust. That might not be so lame.

If I was going to get all analytical, I would say that Howe spent too much time focused on her history and Connie’s quest to find the spell book, and not enough time on making any of her characters remotely interesting. By the end, I really didn’t care if she found the book and saved her precious gentleman friend or not, though I knew she would, and that everything would magically turn out okay. Because the book is someone’s FANTASY and usually ladies don’t write themselves out of the story before they get to fall in love and live happily ever after with their boy toy and their new found magical abilities.

Maybe I'm just being harsh. Or maybe Katherine Howe really IS a witch, and this horrendously boring book is just a clever ruse to drive all interest away from the subject, thereby allowing her to live and practice magic in peace!

Gee, I can't wait for the day when some over-educated brat rips my book apart and mocks me openly in their newfangled space blog! That'll be the day!