In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters

Mary Shelley Black (yes, named after the author) is a budding scientist in a man's world - the author manages to subtly weave a few gender equality struggles into the story without letting it overtake the main plot focus ( 'why can't a girl be smart without it being explained away as a rare supernatural phenomenon?'). Winters takes you back to this time of fear and dread and into this world she introduces a fantastic heroine and a supernatural mystery. Your neighbour who you were speaking to just yesterday might very well be dead today after being hit with a fever during the night. People cover their faces with masks and peer anxiously at those standing next to them, checking for the first signs of illness. Plain wooden boxes become the coffins of the latest victims and they lie piled in the street, waiting to be carried away on the back of trucks. In the Shadow of Blackbirds is an incredibly atmospheric novel that captures the fear of fighting an invisible enemy at home while your loved ones fight the foreign threat across the globe. Now, it's pretty much all I can think about. I did not, however, think of the Spanish influenza that infected 500 million people and killed between 20 and 50 million of those - until now. When I think of death in 1918, I picture a bleak image of those trenches filled with corpses, surrounded by rats and filth. I think of trenches and Kaiser Willhelm and a general fear that your father, husband, brother and/or son will never make it back to you. When I think of 1918, I think of a world torn apart by war. I thought this was fantastic - one of the best books I've read in a long while. (Apr.The lovely Cat Winters joined us over at the blog to talk about the inspiration for this novel and writing about women in 1918: Agent: Barbara Poelle, Irene Goodman Agency. Unsettling b&w period photographs appear throughout, à la Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, greatly adding to the novel’s deliciously creepy atmosphere. Winters’s masterful debut novel is an impressively researched marriage of the tragedies of wartime, the 1918 flu epidemic, the contemporaneous Spiritualism craze, and a chilling love story and mystery.

When Mary comes to, she discovers she can communicate with the dead, including Stephen. Grieving for her childhood beau Stephen, who died while fighting overseas with the Army, Mary goes outside during a thunderstorm and is struck dead by lightning-for a few minutes. With WWI raging on and Mary’s father on trial for treason, she goes to live with her Aunt Eva in San Diego, Calif., even as influenza sweeps across America, devastating the population and rendering those left behind paranoid and weary. Sixteen-year-old Mary Shelley Black lives up to her striking name-she’s a curious girl fascinated by science, living in 1918, “a year the devil designed,” as Mary puts it.

In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters