I was hoping for a better story, but the whole book seemed out of joint to me. The flashbacks were better, but I felt that the author wanted to impress with her knowledge of colonial social history and overwhelmed with details. And a personal hate is when an author tries too hard to "speak" in the local parlance, especially in the modern era, where she made a Boston accent sound like a foreign language. 
 On a side note, one of the reasons I read this is because she is descended from the same Howe family as my husband and is familiar with the family history. But it strained my belief that she wrote in the book that Connie, the protaganist and a colonial scholar, wasn't familiar with names like Temperance, Deliverance, etc. Also, the Danes were a fairly famous family in the Salem witch trials, so again, it seemed unlikely that Connie wouldn't have heard the name. 
 The book was okay, but I was disappointed.