nomadreader

The backstory: I read Samantha Hunt's first novel, The Seas , when it was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2011. At the time, I said , "Despite Hunt's somewhat ironic assertion that "details make a story even as unbelievable as mine believable," neither the details nor the narrative made this novel believable, yet it couldn't compel me to suspend belief and enter its world either." But I loved Hunt's writing, so I was curious about Mr. Splitfoot , her latest novel. The basics:  "Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth’s niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who — or what —...

The backstory: I previously adored Valerie Martin's Orange Prize -winning novel Property . The basics: The Mary Celeste  was found abandoned in 1872. The ship was in tact, there were no signs of a struggle, but the crew was gone. Arthur Conan Doyle writes a soon-to-be-famou short story about what happened. Meanwhile, medium Violet Petra, who can communicate with the dead, exemplifies the growing fascination with ghosts and unexplained. My thoughts: I was not familiar with the mystery of the Mary Celeste  before reading this book, but I was instantly intrigued by it. Martin does not structure this novel in a straight-forward way, which mimics the mystery of the ship itself. Characters come and go throughout the novel, and the reader is left to piece together how these parts fit together. This passage about a third of the way into the novel illustrates Martin's craftiness: "Though most of its critics recognized Jephson's "Statement" as fiction and placed...