Ashley > Books: for-research-purposes‎ (11)

1. I am, and always have been, obsessed with the Salem witch trials, and I love a good telling of history. This book combines both. The witch trials, though, absolutely fascinate me. A large part of the text features protagonist Connie's historical musings on the causes, historical context, and social culture surrounding the trials (the author's academic background coming out to play). This part absolutely fascinated me, but I can see how people who just want a whiz-bang fantasy book about witches who don't give a shit about history would find these sequences boring. Of course, I reserve the right to judge said people for thinking so, but that's my prerogative, I suppose.

2. Like Connie, I have a (very recent) experience working in academia. The sequence where she takes her oral exams gave me panic flashes back to my own not so distant oral exams. And even though I've never been to Harvard, and my Masters program was nowhere as exhausting as Connie's PhD, it was a very familiar environment to me, and one I could easily relate to. Unfortunately, it's also a very narrow one, and again, I can see how some might find it dull.

3. I spent a large part of my graduate work with a professor of Women's Studies who occasionally crossed over into English Lit. Her main specialty is the inner lives of women from about 1600-1900, and she uses a lot of primary sources (mostly women's diaries) to back up her research, so a lot of what Connie was dealing with in the search for Deliverance Dane's book felt extremely familiar. I'm also a sucker for any novel that can illuminate the social history of women in interesting ways, and that's something I feel this novel really gets right.

4. I love old shit. Old houses, old books, old churches, old everything. This book was like a treasure trove of all that crap. It was awesome.