This foreshadows the potentially sinister tone that haunts much of the rest of the book. The setting darkens as Connie's dog discovers a Mandrake root, extremely poisonous and known to be harbingers of death in much folklore. Once there, Connie finds her grandmother's house, completely overgrown with weeds and herbs and oddly without any updates there is no electricity, refrigeration, or phone. Still, Connie keeps her updated as the research takes her back to her grandmother's small New England town, Wonderment, Marblehead, Massachusetts. Connie's mother, a leftover hippie, seems sadly detached from and disinterested in Connie's work. Chilton seems overly hopeful that her topic will benefit his own studies, which he will be presenting at the Colonial Association Conference in September. Connie, a historian of "American Colonial Life" is tasked with discovering new angles and a new primary source for her dissertation topic. Connie Goodwin thinks her main conflict is her prickly Harvard doctoral mentor, Professor Manning Chilton, but she finds worse than that in her family's Puritan ancestry while researching to become a professor and finding love.
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