Serge Akinto Akinto من عند Saint-Sulpice-de-Grimbouville, فرنسا من عند Saint-Sulpice-de-Grimbouville, فرنسا

I was very excited about reading The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane for my Halloween reading fest this year. From the premise, this novel seemed to have all of the ingredients for a great Halloween read...a story based upon the Salem witch trials and present day Salem, Massachusetts...a graduate student researching the history of an undiscovered Salem witch...sounds promising, doesn't it? All in all, I found the novel disappointing. While the writing wasn't "bad", it wasn't great either. Given the subject matter, the writing was far from being engaging or bewitching. I was expecting a Gothic thriller more along the lines of The Historian. An engaging novel chock-full of history, horror, and suspense. Overall, there was no real magic. No real suspense. The characters were generally flat, the protagonist increasingly dense and obtuse, and the storyline predictable within the first hundred pages. And I truly wanted to love this book but could barely bring myself to finish it.