book review: The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin
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...