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Book Reviewed by:Three wickedly funny sisters. One family's extraordinary legacy. A single suicide note that spans a century...
Meet the Alter sisters - Lady, Vee, and Delph - three delightfully witty, complicated women who live together in their family's apartment on the Upper West Side. Though they love each other fiercely, being an Alter isn't easy. Bad luck is in their genes, passed down through the generations. But no matter what curves life throws at these siblings, they always have a wisecrack—and each other.
Now, in the waning days of 1999, as the century comes to an end, Lady, Vee, and Delph decide that their time is up, too. First, they must write a note: a mesmerizing accounting of their lives that stretches back decades, to the brilliant scientist - their great grandfather - whose sinister legacy has defined them.
Smart, heartbreaking, and completely original, Reunion of Ghosts is an epic story of three unforgettable women and one exceptional family, and a magnificent saga of the twentieth century itself.
One of Mitchell's conceits is to counterbalance the depressing aspects of her situations with just enough humor to avoid sounding maudlin. One of the most cleverly told stories I've come across in a very long time, despite the fact that some of the eras and subjects discussed are practically dramatic clichés...continued
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(Reviewed by Davida Chazan).
As noted in my review, one unique aspect of Judith Claire Mitchell's A Reunion of Ghosts is her use of the first person plural literary voice. According to most sources, this point of view dates back to ancient Greece and its famous Greek choruses, which spoke in unison as a group. With such a rich history, you might think more authors would be writing using this perspective. However, Laura Miller in her 2004 article in The New York Times, notes that it is difficult to pull off and has many drawbacks: "You could say that the history of Western literature so far has been a journey from the first-person plural to the first-person singular, the signature voice of our time." Still, this isn't stopping writers from employing it, and recently ...
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