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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.
Excerpt
A Reunion of Ghosts
From a distance the tattoo wrapped around Delph's calf looks like a serpentine chain, but stand closer and it's actually sixty-seven tiny letters and symbols that form a sentence—a curse:
the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the 3rd & 4th generations
We are that fourth generation: Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter, three sisters who share the same Riverside Drive apartment in which they were raised; three women of a certain age, those ages being, on this first day of summer 1999, forty-nine, forty-six, and forty-two. We're also seven fewer Jews than a minyan make, a trio of fierce believers in all sorts of mysterious forces that we don't understand, and a triumvirate of feminists who nevertheless describe ourselves in relation to relationships: we're a partnerless, childless, even petless sorority consisting of one divorcee (Lady), one perpetually grieving widow (Vee), and one spinster—that would be Delph...
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
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Davida Chazan).
Anthony Doerr, New York Times bestselling author of All The Light We Cannot See
This is a triumphant, beautiful, and devastating novel about coincidences, family, and the sins of our fathers. Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of The Vacationers
A rich portrait of a complicated family, at turns violent and hilarious, shot through with love and death and the scars that reappear generation after generation. Lauren Groff, New York Times bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia
Judith Claire Mitchell understands what's at the marrow of our funny bones: that humor lives in darkness, that our families are our curses and our blessings, that great pain can beget great warmth and love.
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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