Sirens Conference discussion

This month, I tackled In the Shadow of Blackbirds, by Cat Winters. Set in 1918, primarily in San Diego, California, In the Shadow of Blackbirds explores a period in American history that I know woefully little about. (Somewhat inexplicably, my high school American history class picked up with the assassination of Lincoln and ended with the Gilded Age; if you’re thinking that’s a pitifully small slice of American history, I would wholeheartedly agree with you. Given the opportunity to rectify this travesty in college, I instead selected a course on the growth and development of Third-World cities, which turned out, fascinatingly, to be primarily about the impact of colonialism on the layout and architecture of cities.)

You, of course, know that 1918 was smack in the middle of World War I. What you might know that I didn’t was what American life looked like during the war. German persecution abounded, Americans turned to Spiritualism (for example, séances and spiritualist photography) for a glimpse of their dead loved ones, and the 1918 flu pandemic killed millions.

I added In the Shadow of Blackbirds, by Cat Winters, to my hauntings reading list for a couple reasons. First, I really know very little of this period in American history. I had no idea that there was a flu pandemic and the book’s exploration of spiritualist photography is quite interesting. Second, In the Shadow of Blackbirds received much critical acclaim in the past year, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Perhaps interestingly – perhaps unsurprisingly – the things I liked best about In the Shadow of Blackbirds had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with ghosts. Mary Shelley Black is the aspiring scientist daughter of a scientist mother, and indeed, is named after that Mary Shelley. Her mother is dead, and at the beginning of the book, her father is arrested (for, as we learn later, failing to fall in with the anti-German sentiments of the time), leaving Mary Shelley to board the train to her Aunt Eva in San Diego. Aunt Eva, a widow in her twenties, is now, for all her complaints and nonsense, working in a shipyard building battleships, and that element, and Mary Shelley’s unwavering support for her aunt’s doing the job of men, were one of my favorite bits of the novel.

Mary Shelley knows a family in San Diego, and at the beginning of the novel, a lengthy friendship with the younger brother blossoms into love, just before he ships out for war. The older brother is a spiritualist photographer – that is, a photographer that summons the spirits and takes pictures that show the subject as well as, if the spirits like you, ghostly presences. Over all of this, the pall of the flu looms, and the book conveys the panic and suffocation of the time quite well: baths of boiling water, endless meals of onions, the ever-present mask.

What starts as a ghost book – and there are ghosts in this book, I swear – eventually gives way to a mystery novel, not unlike the approach of my favorite of Rosemary Clement-Moore’s works (Texas Gothic and Spirit and Dust). The ghosts eventually become somewhat mundane as Mary Shelley begins to crack the mystery.

I liked Mary Shelley a great deal. She’s active, she’s smart, she takes no crap from anyone, she’s progressive in a time when women generally weren’t, and she runs around with scientific goggles on her face for half the book. (How awesome is that?) I didn’t love any of the rest of the characters, though; perhaps notably, though, Mary Shelley’s being surrounded by, frankly, sometimes awful people added greatly to the book’s sense of claustrophobia and overwhelming inertia.

Have you read In the Shadow of Blackbirds? What did you think?

Amy

I read this a while back now. I loved the story.

You did a great job describing this book, by the way.

I really got upset by the kids playing on the coffins. But the mystery of the book is what really pulled me in this time. Mary was a great character and she really helped make the story what it was. Julius was a piece of work and her Aunt had no self respect what so ever. I would have liked to see more letters back and forth between Mary and Steven, but overall it is a great mystery and yes there are ghosts, just wait for it.