Affinity

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Call Number: BOCD Fiction
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	BOCD Fiction	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Compact discs.
Narrated by Juanita McMahon.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Thoroughly haunting! submitted by torikaebaya on February 4, 2017, 1:29pm Tonight I will sleep fitfully, haunted more by a young spiritualist than by her spirits. Artfully crafted, using imagery that springs to mind so vividly one would think it a memory, Sarah Waters has fashioned yet another masterpiece.

The year is 1874. Selina Dawes, a mysterious and powerful young spirit-medium is imprisoned in a monstrous and daunting women’s gaol, Millbank. Jailed after a botched spirit-communication lead to the death of her patron, Selina is visited by no one but her spirit friends until a local mistress comes to visit the prisoners.

The visitor, Margaret Prior, is a young lady of London, highly educated and brought up as assistant to her late father, an arts professor. Despairing his absence from her life, Margaret travels about in something of haze—looking for something she knows not what. When she encounters Dawes, Margaret is simultaneously scared witless by the girl and entranced by her power. The women’s relationship builds with Margaret learning more about Dawes from newspapers and first hand accounts, than from her fleeting and bewildering encounters with Selina.

Interspersed with short journal entries from Selina’s days as a burgeoning spirit-medium conducting séances, the story follows Margaret’s research as she seeks to uncover the mystery of Selina’s past, her powers, and why she is so affected by her. Although the reader is not privy to Selina’s current thoughts, her journal entries, coupled with her unexplainable powers and knowledge of the spirit realm make her enticing and irresistible. In stark and painful contrast to her exciting prison visits, Margaret’s everyday life unfortunately is constantly rearing its ugly head. Her sister is getting married and the preparations fill her days with a dreary stupor.

Although Affinity could hardly be called frightening, it is nevertheless haunting. Descriptions of landscapes, buildings, rooms, etc. feel so intensely ominous that they end up being far scarier than accounts of the spirit encounters. Affinity’s characters can be trusted to illicit your empathy, pity, sorrow, hatred, wonder, love and lust (and in my cast jealousy). Being at once a tale of impropriety and youthful indiscretion between girls, and a bildungsroman of Margaret’s spiritual and sexual development, one cannot but feel compassion toward its struggling young lovers.