Book Review - Katherine Howe's The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs
The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs by Katherine Howe
Published by: Henry Holt and Co.
Publication Date: June 25th, 2019
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)
Connie is back in the same room at Harvard she took her oral doctoral examination in. Only this time she's on the other side of the table, asking the questions. Her protege Zazi will pass, despite Connie worrying that her study of syncretic religion, such as Voodoo and Hoodoo, is a little too niche. Afterwards there are drinks at Abner's and she comes home to Sam a little drunker and a lot later than she promised. It's been nine years since the summer of weirdness. Since she saved Sam's life using Deliverance Dane's physick book. Nothing much has changed in almost a decade. She is still in academia, now a professor up for tenure at Northeastern. Her world has changed very little despite the revelations of 1991. But then again, so much happened that summer it's almost easier to forget. She has far more pressing concerns. Her book based on her dissertation is overdue. She is swamped with grading and mentoring Zazi. And networking, talking to old colleagues like Thomas, seem to take up as much time as actually teaching. But her life is about to drastically change. Connie and her mother Grace have grown a little closer since Grace moved back to her childhood home in Marblehead. At the start of February Connie goes to see Grace and is given a gift and an ultimatum. Her mother attaches a bracelet to Connie's wrist that contains an eaglestone and tells Connie that she must leave Sam. Now. Connie is baffled. She thought Grace loved Sam like a son and to tell Connie to kick him to the curb makes no sense. Until her best friend Liz puts the pieces together. Connie is pregnant. During the summer of weirdness when Connie saved Sam from the machinations of her mentor Chilton Manning she assumed she'd broken the family curse that all women lose their partners. But as Grace informs Connie, their power comes from pain, both physical and emotional. That's why their men die. To fuel their powers. But not until the line is secure. Connie's pregnancy is what has put Sam at risk. A pregnancy she can't even tell him about. He'll want to get married. He's already proposed once. She did not take it well. Marriage, children, all of it have to wait for after tenure. Then, her place secured, she can concentrate on other aspects of her life. The aspects that aren't academic. The fact that she's pregnant has derailed all this. So she bottles it up. She was able to deny the witchier aspects of herself for almost a decade, what's waiting a few weeks or months to even admit she's pregnant? She'll figure out a solution to saving Sam and then she'll tell him everything. She just needs to go into serious research mode. For that she enlists Zazi. What they find might change everything Connie's known about her family. Because it appears that Temperance Hobbs's husband was an exception to the rule. He was saved in 1816 with dire consequences to the world. But Sam is Connie's entire world. She will find a way to save him. The world be damned.
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane was by no means perfect, but by some alchemical admixture it became perfect. Its sequel, The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs, is also by no means perfect, but there is no alchemy or even one redeeming feature in this book. It's predictable, preposterous, riddled with errors, repetitive, and just stupid. Thomas as the villain can be seen a mile off. The less said about Zazi the better because a new character should be fully rounded not intrusive and smacking of tokenism and have you referring to them as a DEI hire in the Republican sense. We're honestly supposed to believe that Sam doesn't notice that Connie is five months pregnant!?! What's more, seeing as she had twins, at four months she would have looked full term, so, this is complete bullshit. But then again, she doesn't even track her period which, as a woman, makes absolutely no sense. Established facts from the first volume are thrown out the window. The stone that Sam showed Connie in Marblehead no longer has a word on it but a drawing. An event that specifically took place on the Autumnal Equinox now happens sometime "over the summer." Connie spends the first half of the this book referring to her ancestral line as the "Goodwin" line only to have her change and call it the "Dane" line for no reason at the halfway mark. We're told that they didn't know volcanoes caused the Year Without a Summer in 2000!?! Just because that's what Connie says that doesn't make it so. For a book rooted in history this is an unacceptable error. Did this book even have an editor? There is just so much repetition of the same "facts" and turns of phrase that it became beyond annoying. This reaches it's zenith when Connie performs the weather work. We read Connie perform the entire spell and save Sam. Then we have to repeat this entire chapter but 184 years earlier when Temperance saved her husband with the same spell. It's beat for beat the same thing. Why!?! I won't even get into the fact that I don't understand why they're saving their significant others because there is no believable connection between them. I do not feel the love that is willing to risk the world. And Temperance risked so much. As for the stupidity? That is all Connie. She has regressed and is now the full embodiment of the too dumb to live trope. And keep in mind, this isn't including the aforementioned hiding of her pregnancy. Nine years have passed since the first book and the "summer of weirdness." In that time instead of delving further into her ancestry she has been in denial. She isn't a witch. She just writes about historical women viewed as witches. While knowing full well real witches exist. What!?! Talk about a conflict. She's even writing a book using Deliverance's book of shadows as a primary source but hasn't looked at the microfilm of that book in nine years. Wasn't she worried they might deaccession it? She seems to have spent almost a decade of her life in limbo, assuming that she saved Sam from the family curse and that she can deny her heritage by diving headfirst into academia. I'm sorry, but your past will always catch up to you. Not that a cardboard cutout character like Connie could ever understand that. She understands nothing.
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
