The author has to make you trust the story. I've thought about it a lot since I finished AFFINITY, and I've decided that it's a matter of trust. It has been told a thousand times, after all, and some of those tellings are pretty durned compelling. I mean, yes, there's a lesbian twist, and that's a nice thing to see, but the bones are the same.That's not to say that the story can never, ever work. but COME ON, people! This's one of the classics! This story's been told a thousand times! I know it pretty damned well. And maybe this book is tense, subtle, and cleverly twisted if you don't know the story. All the blurbs emphasize the tension, the subtlety, the clever twists and turns. It's brilliant.Unfortunately, the rest of it doesn't quite live up to the set dressings. And the spiritualism? My goodness, is it ever interesting stuff! Seriously, people, you'll feel like you're there. The whole thing even smells like the 1870's, with its thick fogs and coal-burning stoves, cold prison walls and richly decorated parlors.

The characters' attitudes and reactions are spot on. This book feels exactly like a book set in 1870's London should feel. Although initially skeptical of Selina’s gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina’s freedom, and her own.Īs in her noteworthy deput, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters brilliantly evokes the sights and smells of a moody and beguiling nineteenth-century London, and proves herself yet again a storyteller, in the words of the New York Times Book Review, of 'startling power.' Read moreĪ gently-bred woman with scholarly inclinations becomes involved in a plot to break a medium out of prison.I'll say this for Sarah Waters: she is damned good at evoking whichever time period she turns her hand to. Selina was imprisoned after a séance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman deeply disturbed. Amongst Millbank’s murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by on apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. “Gothic tale, psychological study, puzzle narrative…This is gripping, astute fiction that feeds the mind and senses.”- The Seattle TimesĪn upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women’s ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London’s grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work.

Affinity sarah waters ending