Grasp The House Of Velvet And Glass Presented By Katherine Howe Depicted In Electronic Format

have to say I was not as impressed with this book as I was with sitelinkThe Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, I had high hopes, but I found this story kind of fell flat, The romance too a bit took too long to even simmer,
Personally, I thought she took on too many story lines and so none of the story lines were very strong, What I loved about the other book I read by this author was the way I wanted to know what really happened and there was a sense that all was not like it seemed.
This book promised something of the same, but I don't know if she really delivered,
I wanted to know what what was going on and hoped that she was able to connect everything in the end, but not enough to want to read more than one chapter at bedtime.
Every now and again a novel comes along that has the power to bewitch and captivate, and The House of Velvet and Glass by Katherine Howe is just such a novel.
Set inBoston, Sibyl Allston seems destined to be an old maid confined to managing her fathers home and living a careful life where little changes, Still reeling from the loss of her mother and her younger sister on the Titanic, Sibyl dutifully continues to meet with a medium in an attempt to contact her lost loved ones.
Her father, aloof and undemonstrative, made his fortune at sea and is content to work at his shipping business or closet himself in his study, When Sibyls brother Harlan turns up having been kicked out of Harvard, and in a tawdry affair with a young women of questionable background Sibyl finds herself awakening to a life she never imagined.
Accompanying Harlans girlfriend to Chinatown Sibyl discovers an unusual talent for scrying, Her talents may be just “pipe dreams” or they may in fact allow her to see into the future, As she begins to explore her new found ability she stumbles on to a long kept family secret, Rich with period detail, Howe deftly entwines colonialist Shanghai, the wreck of the Titanic, Bostons drawing rooms and the days leading up to the Great War, A magical storyteller, Howe enchants readers with a story fit for lovers of historical fiction and tales of the supernatural, Preferably I would give this novel one and a half, The premise, young woman recovering from the loss of her mother and sister on the Titanic and trying to learn why her younger brother was expelled from Harvard in his senior year while interesting, was far too ambitious and poorly executed by this author.


I just finished this last night and already find myself struggling to remember the heroine's name, The character development was nonexistent and the plot device of switching betweenBoston, the final moments on the Titanic, and Shanghaibrought the story to a complete and utter halt.


I was really looking forward to a tale of the seedy opium dens of back alley Boston and the mystery of the brother's expulsion along with the intrigue of a medium's seances, however these were all jumbled together and if I had to read the description of something as "puddled" one more time e.
g. "her dressing gown puddled on the floor", "the moonlight puddled through the window", etc, etc. I was going to throw the book in the garbage,

Altogether this novel did not live up to the flap copy, Looking at the separate pieces of this story, I feel like I should have liked it better, But everything that had potential is either over or under explained to the point where it's hard to care, The author either bores me with too much info, or just leave it hanging but somehow without any sense of suspense, I read a long way into the book before I realized there wasn't any one thing driving the plot and o I found it hard to care.
. . are we looking for a developing romance for Sibylline, for Eulah, for Harlan for a supernatural revelation, for family conflict and resolution
So many parts of the story made me think "this is where it will get interesting", but it never really did.
I'm not big on the Titanic, but I liked Helen and Eulah, Not sure why the author tried to get in a big "reveal moment " when the name of the ship they are on is mentioned, . . that was in the dust jacket description, we all knew where they were,

They only showed up a few times though, and while I didn't need to see them die, I did think their story would connect better to the main storyline.
The history of Lan as a sailor on shore leave in Singapore, seemed cliche, . . brothels, fistfights, and opium, but knowing from his family who Lan appears to be in adulthood, I was curious to see how it played out, We see the beginnings of the psychic story here, but otherwise don't learn much about Lan, Harlan's injured condition in the first chapters seems like it will have an exciting backstory, especially with the appearance of Dovie, Unfortunately, we did know the cause of it after all and it's not exciting nor did Dovie need to be involved, Dovie, I liked, with her mysterious background and her attitude, but those too, once explained, are rather boring and Dovie loses her appeal as the book goes on.
Harlan I basically wrote off as a stock character in the beginning, but by the end I liked him a bit better than I expected to, Betty is introduced, is given some small scenes that again could have been made into something intriguing, but then disappears, Sibyll started off boring and gullible, she's attending seances, which isn't as interesting as you'd hope, dealing with an apparent eating disorder, which seems like it should become an issue but only resurfaces on occasion, and then she's introduced to opium.
This offers the basic plot twist that I would call a surprise, except nothing about the book felt surprising to me, Everything seemed to build up so slowly and quietly, that the few plot twists that do appear seem anticlimatic, Since she at one point had a couple of suitors, I assume there must be something appealing about Sybill, but I never saw it, Not sure why Benton liked her, not entirely sure why he left her for someone else it's brushed off in a sentence, and never looked back on by way of explanation.
I liked Benton and Edwin, and come to think of it, they might be the only two that I didn't wind up disappointed in,
I wanted to like this one, based on all the potentially fascinating elements, but it just didn't fully deliver on any of them, I think this one will be much too quickly forgotten, Originally published at sitelink readingreality. net

The House of Velvet and Glass is Katherine Howe's second novel, after her fantastic breakout debut, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, Both stories have a certain magic in them,

While Dane's story was about the practice of witchcraft, Sybil Allison, the character who provides our entree into The House of Velvet and Glass, is interested in spiritualism.
Sybil's usually practical nature has found refuge in the search for contact with her loved ones who have passed "beyond the veil", She was not alone in her search in the upper class of Boston of, or anywhere for that matter, Spiritualism was very popular.

But membership in the seance that Sybil attended was special, Everyone in that select group lost a loved one at the same place and time: on April,, in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic, when the RMS Titanic sank on her maiden voyage.
Sybil's mother and younger sister were among the,dead,

Sybil now runs the house for her father and her younger brother, but life has lost its spark for all of them, By returning to the same medium that her mother used to visit, Sybil searches for reassurance that her mother's spirit has found peace somewhere, while Sybil has none of her own.


In the real world of, three years after the disaster, the Allston family is drifting apart, Sybil to spiritualism, her father to his shipping business, and her brother Harley to dissipation and ruin.


Harley's dissipation leads him to a severe beating and hospitalization, as well as a discovery of how far he's fallen, and who he's fallen with, He's been thrown out of Harvard, and has taken up with a young actress, In the wake of his injuries, his young lady is brought into the house, and Dovie shakes everyone back to life,

Sibyl takes Dovie under her wing she fills the space in her heart left by her younger sister, And Dovie takes Sybil to places Sybil might never have otherwise gone, and she does things that she might otherwise not have done, The actress takes her to smoke opium one fine afternoon, and Sybil discovers that, with the help of the opium, she can see the last night on the Titanic, or so she believes.


Her friend Benton Derby is sure she's just fooling herself, He is a psychologist, he doesn't believe in spiritualism, His colleague, Edwin Friend, on the other hand, believes that spiritualism might have a scientific basis, Even though Professors Derby and Friend expose Sybil's medium as a fraud, Dr, Friend still believes spiritualism might be real,

But it is, and there is a war in Europe, Whether or not spiritualism is real is about to become the least of anyone's problems in the U, S.

Just as there are three living people in the Allston family, the story of The House of Velvet and Glass is told in three separate threads.
The major thread is Sybil's story, in the present of, The second thread takes place on the Titanic, on the last night, as Helen and Eulah Allston while away the last evening of their lives, not knowing until the very end that it was all about to go smash.
And finally, the third thread is the story of Lan Allston, Sybil's father, from his days at sea, His story ties everything together in a way that will break your heart,

Escape Rating B: The story takes a little while to really get going, but the end races along, The last bit, I didn't quite expect and should have, Also, I assumed that the House of Velvet and Glass referred to was the Titanic, but it's not, I like it when an author surprises me, .