Last April the Texas Library Association convention was held in San Antonio so I went for the first time.  I was told before going to bring a bag with me because you get a lot of free books on the show floor.  Well I don’t know where people were getting the bags full of free books, but I was able to get this book for free from one of the vendors on the floor.  For the past month I’ve been reading this book off and on.  It is historical fiction written by an elementary teacher in New York state about the beginning of the spiritualism movement in America.  I’m not a big fan or reader of historical fiction, but I did manage to get through this book and it was OK.

The book, set in the 1850s, focuses on the Fox sisters Maggie and Kate from Hydesville, New York. Maggie and Kate Fox existed in real life, but this is a fictionalized telling of their story.   Their niece who they don’t like very much pays them a visit and so to play a trick on her, Kate comes up with the idea of rapping a message from the afterlife.  She and Maggie did this by cracking joints in their feet or tapping the floor surreptitiously below their petticoats.  It started simply with one rap for yes and two raps for no, but soon they devised a system where the spirit could spell out words from the alphabet to make complete sentences.  The neighbors soon heard about this phenomena and wanted to see for themselves and soon the whole town was making pilgrimages to the house for spirit readings.

The girls were then sent to Rochester to live with their older sister Leah and they held spirit readings from their parlor there.  In Rochester they met such luminaries in the Abolitionist movement and early women’s suffrage movements as Amy Post who was friends with Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. They had their fair share of critics and skeptics as well and there was a particularly interesting scene in the book where Maggie was visiting Troy, New York.  A mob of skeptics were after her and were throwing rocks at the home she was staying at.  Luckily these people she was staying with were conductors on the underground railroad and were able to sneak her out of town in a hidden compartment below their covered wagon.

The second half of the book deals with Maggie’s relationship with Arctic explorer Elisha Kane.  Kane was renown all through America for his exploration and was getting ready to embark on another trip to Greenland and further north to find the existence of an Arctic sea.  He promised Maggie that on his return, they would get married.  However his family was deathly opposed to this union in that they belonged to a wealthier social class than Maggie.  I won’t reveal any more of the story however.

There were some interesting bits in the book and the fact that it was based on a true story is kind of interesting as well.  I’m just not as interested in the topics of psychic phenomena and spiritualism as are covered in this book.  All in all I thought the book was merely OK.