The Entirely True Story of the Fantastical Mesmerist Nora Grey
Generational pains are soothed by supernatural revelations in Kathleen Kaufman’s captivating historical novel The Entirely True Story of the Fantastical Mesmerist Nora Grey.
Following the death of Nairna’s grandmother, her absent father, Tavish, plucks her from her comfortable rural life and takes her with him on the spiritualist circuit. Together, they perform divinations and seances across the Scottish countryside. But while Tavish’s occultism is an act, Nairna has natural talents—and misgivings about their deceptions. When a wealthy spiritualist recognizes her gifts, Nairna has the opportunity to lift herself and her father out of poverty, but at the cost of anonymity and their safety.
With each reading, Nairna’s abilities grow and buried family truths are unearthed. Nairna learns that her guide is her grandmother, Lottie—long maligned in local lore, but now revealed to have fallen victim to others’ machinations. Lottie speaks to Nairna across time, unraveling a tale of lost love, Victorian-era cruelties, and wrongful institutionalization. And even as she draws connections between those who pushed Lottie to the brink and those who would manipulate her talents in the present, Nairna begins to see how the resentments between her and her father might be healed.
The story is swift and exciting, moving between the women’s time periods with electric fervor. Social norms and breaks with convention are addressed in both eras, and the women’s defiant spirits bind them across time. That (beyond a profusion of farces and manipulators) supernatural gifts are real herein leads to enthralling turns. Snippets of newspaper clippings and indignant letters-to-the-editor fill in the scandalized society’s background, but the novel’s primary focus remains on its indomitable women.
A father-daughter rift is healed with a bit of mystical assistance in the feminist historical novel The Entirely True Story of the Fantastical Mesmerist Nora Gray.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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