PJ I’ve always had a
fascination with the past. As a kid, I
devoured tomes about Victorian England, the Tudors, and the Plantagenets as if
they were candy. I loved reading about
royalty, the rich upper crust, and the poor and oppressed. But it wasn’t until I began researching the
kernel of what would eventually become my debut middle-grade novel, Violet
Yorke, Gilded Girl: Ghosts in the Closet about a
poor little rich girl in 1912 Manhattan who sees ghosts, that I realized that
the states had its own version of the Wars of Roses. Not as bloody, perhaps, but just as lethal and
effective.
In America,
Manhattan was the epicenter of the Gilded Age, a time of intoxicating new,
progressive ideas. Things were changing.
Well, not everything, and not fast
enough for some. If you were rich, you
were really, really rich. On Wall
Street, fortunes were made and lost. Obscene
mansions built by the nouveau riche sprouted like weeds.
The Four Hundred,
so-called as reportedly ‘there were only 400 hundred people in fashionable New York
Society’, was run with an iron glove by Mrs Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the
wife of businessman William Backhouse Astor Jr. A
prominent socialite, Mrs Astor was determined, along with the help of
confidants and cohorts, to uphold the stringent standards of etiquette and
behavior of old money and tradition against a swarm of threatening arrivistes. A word, a nod, a wink, a look, or a whisper
from Mrs Astor and her powerful friends could banish people from polite society
in an instant.
Luckily for my poor
little rich girl Violet, who was orphaned as a toddler when her parents were
killed in a ‘random’ robbery, her grandmother was one of Mrs Astor’s best
friends and firmly entrenched in the Four Hundred hierarchy. Violet was expected to fulfill her duty as a
member in good standing: to be obedient, compliant, and in time, make a good
match. That Violet had no intention of
doing any of these things, well, that’s another story entirely.
Poor
little rich girl Violet Yorke has seen ghosts for as long as she can remember,
but no one believes her.
Not
stodgy Grandmother, who took charge of the heiress after her parents were
killed in a failed robbery. Nor
kind-hearted Aunt Nanette, or Uncle Bertie, a charming rogue. Not even the patient Hugo Hewitt, Violet’s
godfather and trustee of her vast fortune.
Everyone
dismissed the child’s insistence about ghosts as a harmless eccentricity—until
the night her bedroom caught fire. Violet
was promptly sent overseas, fuelling her anger and resentment.
Two
years later, a rebellious twelve-year-old Violet is on her way back to
Manhattan on the doomed Titanic. As the
ship sinks into the deep Atlantic Ocean, she’s put in a lifeboat by an
apparition who rescued her from the clutches of a jewel thief. Presumed lost at sea, Violet shocks everyone
by crashing her own funeral.
Following
Violet’s recovery, Grandmother has grand high society designs for the girl, but
Violet has other ideas. She’s determined
to uncover the secret of what really happened to her parents. Then there’s the mystery of the moon-faced boy
at gloomy Dunham Hall and his connection to the ghost on Titanic. Also hot on Violet’s trail is the jewel thief,
the specter of her murdered governess, and a vengeful ghost lurking in Violet’s
childhood home.
Being
a poor little rich girl in 1912 Gotham isn’t all it’s cracked up to be in this
delightfully dark and droll supernatural historical fantasy.
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