The House of Velvet and Glass

Katherine Howe has followed up the success of her debut novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, with a second riveting read in The House of Velvet and Glass (#200).

The main plot thread of this somewhat dark novel follows Sybil Allston, a proper Bostonian spinster whose life has been a series of emotional blows and disappointments.  Her mother and younger sister Eulah were lost on the Titanic three years earlier, her father is a remote presence in the inner drawing room, and her younger brother, once so promising, is wasting his collegiate life on gambling and women. No wonder she's caught up in the coils of Mrs. Dee, an influential medium who was patronised by Sybil's mother. Worse is to come when her brother Harlan is expelled from Harvard, and Sybil meets Dovie Whistler, the cause of her brother's disgrace.  Dovie introduces Sybil to the hidden Chinatown world of the opium den, where Sybil discovers that she has the ability to use the scrying ball Mrs. Dee gave her at the last seance she attended. Is it a gift, or is this new found talent a curse? And why do the visions she sees repeat themselves?

Benton Derby, an old family friend, is now a psychologist and professor at Harvard.  He tries to help the family, and prove to Sybil that the visions she is seeing cannot be real. He also happens to be the man that everyone in Boston society expected Sybil to marry before he announced his engagement to another woman.

The interleaved story of Lan Allston, the family patriarch, begins on his first voyage out of Salem at age seventeen when he steps onto the Bund in Shanghai with his shipmates, and gradually unfolds throughout the book..  The revelation of his secrets shocks Sybil to her core and brings her to a crucial turning point.

The Boston of 1915 comes alive in this book, poised as it is on the cusp of modern technology, with cars battling for room on the streets, electric lights everywhere, and the telephone becoming common in more and more homes, and the Widener Library at Harvard under construction.  This is precisely the Boston and Cambridge that my grandmother lived in.  However, she would have been the first one to point out to Ms. Howe that the pastimes of the ladies of the day certainly did include needlework, the correct generic term, rather than needlepoint, which is a specific form of needlework.  Ms. Howe tends to use needlepoint as a catchall phrase when the items and actions described in the book clearly refer to other forms such as embroidery, crewel, or even possibly hardangar (though this wasn't prevalent in early twentieth century New England). I assume that Ms. Howe has her doctorate by now, so I'm sure she won't mind the small nit-pick.  (If she wants to see an actual piece of needlepoint, she can visit the State House next time she's in Boston, and see the Freedom Trail tapestry in the Senate Chamber lobby.  My mother and I collaborated on the Old North Church panel.)