Summary:
The year is 1918. Not only is World War I in full swing, but there is a Spanish Influenza pandemic as well, which is killing even more people than the war, and has lowered the average life expectancy to thirty-nine years of age. Virtually no one leaves the house without donning a gauze mask to protect themselves. The medical technology available to protect people against the flu is crude at this time, so most people rely on home remedies such as wearing strands of garlic and eating an abundance of onions. Among all this death, the spiritualism craze is all the rage. With the advent of photography, spirit photography is extremely popular. As so many people are dying, the loved ones they left behind find solace in the hope that they might capture the visage of their deceased loved one in a photograph with them. People are lined up around the block for this opportunity, and will pay dearly. Our main character, 16-year-old Mary Shelley Black does not believe in ghosts, but she is forced to reconsider her stance when her sweetheart dies in battle. Stephen, Mary’s love, haunts her in spirit form, and she must find out what he wants.
Review:
I’ve been anticipating this book since it first came out in April 2013. I’ve owned it on my Kindle since August 2014. The only reason I can think of to justify why it took me so long to pick this novel up is why fear of disappointment. Unfortunately, I was disappointed, but I can’t really say why. This book has all the elements I love. I became extremely interested in spiritualism and the early 1900s a couple of years ago. In 2014, I went to a lecture on spiritualism at Dragon Con, explaining how it was all fake, why so many people fell for it, and how many people claiming to communicate with the other side, such as Teresa Caputo from Long Island Medium and John Edward are frauds and how they do what they do. While I don’t believe in spiritualism, I am extremely interested in the subject, and I love reading about the paranormal in my fiction. Frankenstein is probably my favorite classic, so the fact that our main character is named after the author of said classic won me over immediately. I don’t typically like books about war, but this one was different as it focused on how the war affects people (civilians, and soldiers) and there was a good balance between spiritualism, influenza, and WWI. I didn’t know that there was an Influenza pandemic in 1918. I think this is something that I learned in grade school but promptly forgot. There was so much going on in 1918, I’m sure it was hard to cope. Reading this novel makes it easy to understand why so many people turned to spiritualism. This novel reads like apocalyptic science fiction, but many of the events actually happened. What a scary time to be alive. Photography was also a relatively new invention, which probably seemed liked magic to many people in and of itself, so it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for some to believe that you could capture the image of a ghost in a photograph. As I mentioned earlier, I’m really not sure why I didn’t enjoy this novel more as the subject matter was very interesting to me, and well-handled. The only thing I can think of is that the main character was a little boring. Plus, I anticipated this novel for so long and built it up so much in my head that it had little hope of meeting my high expectations. I gave this 3.5 out of 5 stars. This would be a great book to teach students at the same time that they are learning about WWI and the Spanish Influenza in history class.
Winters, Cat. In The Shadow of Blackbirds: A Novel. New York: Amulet, 2013. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment