Picture the Dead (review)

Jennie Lovell's cousin Quinn Pritchett returns to his Massachusetts home from the Civil War wounded, emaciated, and bearing bad news: Jennie's twin brother, Toby has died of illness, and Quinn's own brother Will—Jennie's fiancé—has died in battle. Jennie's grief is compounded by the sudden shift in family dynamics: Will's death means she is no longer on track to become a lady of the household, instead returning to her original status as a poor orphan relative beholden to her mother's family for charity. As she nurses Quinn back to health in the hope that making herself useful will secure her continuing refuge, she discovers that the cousin whom she once considered distant and arrogant has a tenderer heart than she realized; finding herself unexpectedly attracted to Quinn, she accepts his proposal of marriage. When her distraught uncle Henry asks Jennie to arrange a sitting with Mr. Geist, a medium and spirit photographer, terrifying dreams and altered images on the photographs lead Jennie to suspect that one or the other Pritchett brothers have deceived her, and her sanity and life are in peril until she can determine whether Will's spirit visits as a jealous tormentor or a soul in need of vengeance. Griffin is no stranger to the ghost-story genre (The Other Shepards, BCCB 11/98, Where I Want to Be, BCCB 3/05), and her exploration of Geist's manipulative chicanery and utter belief in spiritualism is as involving as the beyond-the-grave communications from Toby and Will. Brown's graytone illustrations of correspondence, clippings, and cartes de visite seem jarringly cartoonish along side the melodramatic period style of Griffin's prose, but the story thrives nonetheless. Middle-schoolers assigned a historical-fiction report when they'd rather being reading a scary story can have the best of both worlds here.