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Reviewed by:
  • Velvet
  • Elizabeth Bush
Hooper, Mary. Velvet. Bloomsbury, 2012. [336p]. ISBN 978-1-59990-479-1 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7–10.

Kitty Marley barely hesitates when her drunken, abusive father falls into the Thames and goes under. Leaving him to his fate, Kitty clears her belongings from their rented rooms, finds herself a position in a commercial laundry, changes her name to Velvet, and never looks back. The work is physically exhausting, but Velvet manages to work her way up the ranks to the status of personal laundress with her own accounts, one of whom, the beautiful young Madame Savoya, offers the orphaned teen a position in her own home. Madame is a celebrated medium, who, with her gorgeous assistant George, performs feats of clairvoyance for audiences in rented halls, and connects grieving clients with relatives who have “passed over.” Readers will plainly see what ambitious but naïve Velvet does not—that Madame and George are con artists, scrambling to keep up with the latest tricks of the trade among their London spiritualist rivals, and bilking the bereaved out of their property and fortunes by passing along directives from beyond to set up philanthropic trusts, administered of course by Madame and George. Escalating risks and a clever little plot twist add value to a storyline that might otherwise amount to no more than a steady march toward Velvet’s inevitable epiphany. Readers who relished the bogus rappings, levitations, and ectoplasmic emanations of Schlitz’s A Drowned Maiden’s Hair or Jocelyn’s How It Happened in Peach Hill (BCCB 11/06, 5/07) will want a seat at Madame Savoya’s table. [End Page 198]

Elizabeth Bush
Reviewer
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