A bright young woman is caught between science and spiritualism in her quest to make sense of a world overcome with war and disease in 1918 California. Mary Shelley Black's world has been turned upside down by the arrest of her father at their home in Portland, Ore. It is 1918, and the country is at war; those who speak out against it, like her father, find themselves persecuted. Mary Shelley flees to her Aunt Eva in San Diego to avoid possible fallout from the arrest and since it might be a better place to wait out the influenza epidemic that is sweeping the country. Her new home allows her to reconnect with the family of her first love, Stephen, now a soldier fighting in the war. This place is just as full of anxiety and fear as Portland, the toll from war and disease sending her families grasping at anything to alleviate their pain. Stephen's distasteful half brother, Julius, exploits those fears and the growing interest in the occult by serving as a "spirit photographer"--an occupation Mary Shelley is skeptical of until Stephen is killed and she is visited by his ghost. Winters strikes just the right balance between history and ghost story, neatly capturing the tenor of the times, as growing scientific inquiry collided with heightened spiritualist curiosity. Vintage photographs contribute to the authenticity of the atmospheric and nicely paced storytelling. (Historical fiction. 12 & up)
Morris Award finalist Cat Winters loves a good ghost story. Her knockout young adult debut, In the Shadow of Blackbirds, tackled World War I, the Spanish flu, séances, and the weight of souls. In her The Cure for Dreaming, 1900 Oregon was the backdrop for a tale of young woman freeing her suppressed independence during the rise of hypnotism.
What do you get when you toss together a bunch of the most brilliant, talented, and creeptastic authors of YA and put them in a single volume of short stories that begs to be read with the lights on? The answer is this summer’s hottest anthology, Slasher Girls & Monster Boys, which features stories by […]
Morris award finalist Cat Winters excels at writing historical ghost stories, whether for teens (In the Shadow of Blackbirds) or adults (The Uninvited). So it’s no surprise that her latest book, The Steep & Thorny Way, is inspired by one of the most famous ghosts in literature: Hamlet’s father. Winters’ version of the Prince of Denmark’s tragic tale […]
A genre that defies easy categorization, magical realism is often associated with the work of Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (100 Years of Solitude) and Laura Esquivel (Like Water For Chocolate). In magical realism, mystical or fantastic events are rendered as everyday occurrences. The extraordinary and the ordinary are intertwined; inseparable. In recent years, […]
There are very, very few things I love more in life than historical fiction and paranormal activity (for the record, those other things are my dog and giant servings of ice cream). Having grown up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and stories about haunted houses, I’m a total freak for things that go bump in […]