Nobody's Secret by Michaela MacColl (review)

Fifteen-year-old Emily Dickinson (yes, that Emily Dickinson) is a mild sort of rebel; she loves to escape chores to wander around the fields and forests of Amherst. One day she meets a handsome young man who calls himself Mr. Nobody. She immediately senses a kindred spirit, but their story turns into a murder mystery instead of a romance when Mr. Nobody is found dead in the Dickinsons' pond. Emily is not content with the constable's determination that the death was an accidental drowning, and she sets out to discover the mystery of the stranger's identity and his untimely death for herself. While Emily Dickinson: Super Sleuth, seems an unlikely premise for a novel, MacColl mines the known peculiarities of the poet's personality and interests, the evocative setting of Amherst, nineteenth-century pharmaceuticals and plant lore, and Dickinson's own poetry to craft a perfectly plausible story. There's plenty of intrigue and suspense as our heroine and her sister, Vinnie, brave real danger in addition to maternal scolding in their pursuit of justice. The excerpted lines from Dickinson's poems that head each chapter are uncannily apt for the subject matter of the mystery, suggesting both the latitude of their interpretive possibilities and the fidelity of MacColl's vision to Dickinson's inner life if not her outer circumstances. Both Emily and Vinnie are believably intelligent and quick-witted as they get into and out of tight spots; readers who aren't interested in Dickinson as a poet may well enjoy her as a detective or simply as a highly imaginative and sensitive heroine in the tradition of Jo March and Anne Shirley. Publicity materials indicate that this is the first in a series of literary figures as teen crime solvers; this delightful debut bodes well for the project.