"Captivity" Blog Tour: Review & Giveaway

Captivity
Author: Deborah Noyes
Publisher: Unbridled Books
ISBN: 9781936071630
Genre: fiction, historical fiction, paranormal

Book Summary (from publisher's website):

      "March 1848: On the very night that a Rochester recluse begins contemplating the end of her simple existence, the walls of a farmhouse in nearby Hydesville resound with inexplicable rapping noises. Maggie Fox and her younger sister rivet family and neighbors by claiming to be able to communicate with an unseen spirit. When the girls reveal the identity of “Mr. Splitfoot,” men with picks and shovels arrive to excavate the cellar in search of remains.
      As word of the Fox sisters’ strange ability spreads far and wide, pilgrims arrive en mass, staking their tents in surrounding fields and peering in the family’s windows. Shortly after ambitious Leah steps in to manage her younger siblings’ affairs, invitations for “tea and table tilting” begin circulating Western New York. Maggie is subjected to rigorous demonstrations and humiliating investigative committees, to strangers who poke and prod but can’t unpuzzle her, and she takes refuge in an unlikely friendship with Clara Gill, a reclusive scientific artist.
      Exiled in Rochester in the wake of a London scandal, Clara is a skeptic of an altogether different sort — one with reason to believe, though reason won’t allow. “The dead are exacting,” she tells Maggie, for it seems Clara knows a thing or two about ghosts.
      As Maggie’s fame grows and a mania for contacting the dead sweeps the nation, her circle widens to include the likes of Horace Greeley, P.T. Barnum, and First Lady Pierce. She embarks on a turbulent affair with the equally famous polar explorer Elisha Kent Kane, and when the aristocratic Kane challenges her to give up her “disgraceful” calling, Maggie is torn between love and independence, shame and duty. Her ties to Clara become all the more binding, and against all odds, Maggie takes it upon herself to help her friend confront a loss beyond reckoning…
      Told from alternating points of view and weaving past with present, Captivity explores an especially haunted moment in U.S. history when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead were flamboyantly lifted, when science and spirit were colorfully at odds, and when the wills of two very different women collided to work an ordinary miracle of devotion."

My Thoughts:

The Victorian Era has always been a fascination for me and I love reading historical fiction from that time period. Since "Captivity" is set in that time frame and deals with the paranormal and "real" people, it was a book that I just HAD to read.

"Captivity" is an amazing and hauntingly captivating historical fiction novel combining the lives of the Fox sisters with an "unstable" woman named Clara Gill. The stories run side-by-side until the merge, bringing Maggie and Clara together. I found both women to be as fascinating as the storyline. Clara was a mystery to me, but at the same time, I had a feeling that there was something more to her than just being "unstable. Maggie was a fun and knowledgeable person. So much depth and as saw things in Clara that others didn't see.

I will admit that I found it hard to get involved with any of the Fox sisters in the beginning. I didn't take to any of them at first. As time went on, Maggie developed into a character that I loved almost as much as I adored Clara.

This is a book that needs to be savored like an expensive glass of wine - slowly and paying much attention to detail as it is complex. There's too much that can be missed if one reads it quickly. Deborah is a master at capturing the reader with her prose. She is definitely an author I'm going to add to my watch list.


About the Author:

Angel and Apostle is Deborah Noyes’ first novel. Her short fiction and reviews have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Boston Sunday Globe, Seventeen, The Washington Post Book World, The Chicago Sun-Times, Stories, The Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, The Bloomsbury Review, Boston Review, and other publications. She has also written and edited numerous books for children and young adults, including the award-winning teen anthology Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales.

Deborah is also an editor and photographer. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. She has taught writing and literature at Emerson College and Western New England College, and was a Visiting Writer in Lesley University's MFA in Writing for Young People program. Deb lives in Massachusetts with her family. 

Book was provided by Unbridled Books for me to honestly review.

GIVEAWAY!!!

Caitlin at Unbridled Books has been kind enough to offer a copy of "Captivity" to one lucky reader of this blog.

To enter:

1. You must be a follower of this blog.
2. You must leave a comment WITH your email address.
3. US and Canada only - no PO boxes.

BONUS Entries !! For extra entries (you must leave links for each):

* Follow me on Twitter - see sidebar for link
* Tweet about this contest (once per day)
* Follow me on Facebook - see sidebar for link


Contest ends June 25, 2010 at 11:59pm EST. Winner will be notified by email and will have 48 hours to respond. If no response, another winner will be drawn. Book will be shipped directly from the publisher.

"Captivity" Blog Tour: Author Spotlight - Deborah Noyes

I'm excited to be able to participate in Deborah Noyes "Captivity" Blog Tour.  Deborah has written a wonderful post in which she shares a bit about her new book "Captivity". Make sure to return tomorrow as we have a special treat in store. We will again be back with the tour and I will be posting my thoughts about "Captivity". The best part about tomorrow is - one lucky reader a copy will have the chance of winning a brand new copy of "Captivity"!!

Giving Up the Ghost (or… Not)

On one level, Captivity is a story about mourning, and I couldn’t have asked for a more appropriate moment in UK/U.S. history to set the story in.

Inspired by Britain’s Queen Victoria, the model “loyal” widow, the Victorians were masters of bereavement. After Prince Albert died in 1861, the queen mourned in virtual seclusion for years and wore black for the rest of her days. But even before Albert’s death, unsentimental ideas about death and grieving left over from ancient and medieval times — “Memento Mori,” “To everything a season,” “Death comes to all” — were being eclipsed by the Christian ideal of a happy Heaven where loved ones would be reunited.

The Victorians saw mourning as key to a successful society. They wore their losses publicly, shunned pleasure for years, and enforced rigid stages of dress — from black crepe to black to gray to white and lavender — along with codes for when it was acceptable to wear jewels again or enjoy dinner parties. All but the abject were subject to these rites, even small children.

In the Antebellum period before the U.S. Civil War, older children wore black or crepe for six months after the death of a parent — three months of “full” mourning gradually followed by “half” mourning. Children under twelve wore white in summer and gray in winter. Even infants were trimmed with black buttons or ribbons.

Mourning warehouses — maisons de noir or black houses to the French —began to crop up in the 1840s to satisfy a demand for “black goods” and were the first department stores. The biggest, like the House of Jay in London, offered everything from hearses to the etiquette books that helped baffled families endure. One-stop shopping, indeed.

The Victorians even made a fashion statement out of memorializing their dead. Hair is intimate but hardy — it resists decay — and the bereaved, with help from an “artist in hair” on London’s fashionable Regent Street, could have it crafted into a locket, a watch chain, or a braided and tasseled necklace with a gold clasp. There were “swivel” brooches for pairing miniature portraits of the departed with locks of their hair, all encased in glass. There were ornate vials or “tear bottles” to collect and display one’s tears.

Things changed radically in the shadow of WWI. In light of the carnage, people came to see mourning like Queen Victoria’s as stubborn, morbid, or antisocial. The sooner you re-entered society the better; mourners should seek a return to normal life at once, “stay occupied,” keep their feelings to themselves. To grieve had become a selfish act.

We’ve seen other cultural shifts since then — from the backlash led by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in the Sixties to the recent green and natural death movements — but no era has considered the problem of loss with as much intensity or creativity as the Victorians.

When you add to this context traditional lore about ghosts — they tend to be classified as the spirits of those who’ve died violently, or with unfinished business — it’s easy to see how a rational person like Clara Gill, one of the two protagonists in Captivity, might struggle to give hers up.

About the Author:

Deb writes for adults and children, and is also an editor and photographer. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. She has taught writing and literature at Emerson College and Western New England College, and was a Visiting Writer in Lesley University's MFA in Writing for Young People program. Deb lives in Massachusetts with her family.

If you'd like to learn more about Deborah, you can visit her website at: http://www.deborahnoyes.com/