The Sweet By and By - Hardcover

MacKin, Jeanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312269978 ISBN 13: 9780312269975

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 2001

Synopsis

Two Victorian schoolgirls, Maggie and Katie Fox grow up in a supposedly haunted house in Hydesville, New York, and gain notoriety and fame for their supposed talent at communicating with dead spirits.

About this title

About the Author

Jeanne Mackin teaches creative writing at Goddard College in Vermont and has taught or conducted workshops in Pennsylvania, Hawaii and New York.  She lives with her husband, artist Steve Poleskie, in upstate New York. She is also the author of several novels:  The Beautiful American, Dreams of Empire, The Queen's War, and The Frenchwoman.

Reviews

The strange-but-true history of Maggie Fox, 19th-century founder of the American Spiritualist movement, haunts a 20th-century journalist in this double-barreled tale of love and loss. Mackin (Dreams of Empire; Queen's War; etc.) skips between Fox's story and that of middle-aged magazine writer Helen West, who takes on an assignment to write an essay about Maggie and her sister Katie. In 1848, the two inventive children drew crowds by claiming that they were receiving spirit messages at their home in upstate New York; in fact, they had devised a clever system involving hidden hammers and cracking joints. The "Hydesville Rappings," as they were dubbed, gained popularity, and the Fox girls were swept off to New York City, where they performed s‚ances for the likes of Horace Greeley. As Helen uncovers this bizarre tale, she begins to feel a kinship with Maggie, an unhappy child who grew up too quickly in a harsh environment. Like Helen, who has been mourning the death of her married lover, Jude, for three years, Maggie also lost her one great love, Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane, and spent the rest of her sorrow-filled life communing with his ghost. Although Helen is not a believer at first, she soon finds herself spooked by mysterious bumps in the night. She believes she feels Jude's presence, and a desperate hope of seeing him again persists even as a new man attempts to woo her. Mackin shifts skillfully between these two atmospheric worlds, and once she tones down the overwritten prose of the first few chapters, the dual narrative acquires rhythm. Intelligent if predictable in its setup, the novel pays homage to two strong women separated by history but united in spirit.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Is death the end? Do ghosts exist? What is faith? Mackin examines these and related issues in a totally nonmacabre manner, telling in tandem two stories that take place about 150 years apart. In 1998, journalist Helen West, while mourning the death of her married lover, Jude, researches the strange life of Maggie Fox, called the Founder of American Spiritualism. Maggie became famous after 1848 when, with her sisters' help, she developed a large following eager to contact the spirits of dearly departed loved ones. Helen becomes involved with her subject and with the concept of the possibility of returning spirits. Can they comfort those they love? Can one enter a loving relationship with another before finding closure with the deceased, previous loved one? This well-written tale is sympathetically conceived and entertainingly presented. Recommended.DEllen R. Cohen, Rockville, MD
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

What toll can grief extract from a life? This is the question that Mackin (Dreams of Empire, 1996) asks of her two main characters as their lives interweave in history. Helen West is a modern-day journalist seeking to recover from the devastating death of her lover. To do so, she is investigating the life of Maggie Fox, founder of the American spiritualism movement in the 1800s. As Helen writes an article on Maggie's tragic, brutal, and oddly heroic life, she begins to experience some of the same events that the visitors to Maggie's seances experienced. Living alone now, in a huge drafty Victorian manor house, off by itself at the side of a wood, Helen is the perfect candidate for a ghost story. Mackin controls Helen's spiral down into the terror of Maggie's life with a fine hand. In a mix of historical biography and lyrical prose, Mackin conjures Victorian America into a wholly realized world and brings to life two women the reader can only cheer and cry for. Despite a rather hackneyed end, the result is a lovely novel. Neal Wyatt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312269978
• ISBN 13: 9780312269975
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 293