Carmella Lowkis – She Reads Novels

In Charles Perrault’s fairy tale about two sisters, Diamonds and Toads, a fairy rewards the good sister with the ability to spit gold and punishes the bad sister with the curse of spitting toads. This is the premise at the heart of Carmella Lowkis’ new novel, Spitting Gold, a tale of two very different sisters living in 19th century Paris.

It’s 1866 and Baroness Sylvie Devereux has settled into a respectable married life, but a visit from her younger sister, Charlotte Mothe, threatens to ruin both her marriage and her reputation. For several years, Sylvie and Charlotte had worked together as spiritualists, conning grieving victims out of large sums of money, but Sylvie has promised her husband that those days are behind her and her sister is no longer part of her life. Now, though, Charlotte is begging Sylvie to join her for one last job and Sylvie finds it impossible to refuse, knowing that Charlotte needs the money to pay their father’s medical bills.

Several members of the wealthy de Jacquinot family believe they are being haunted by the spirit of a great-aunt, who was brutally murdered during the French Revolution, leaving behind a hidden treasure. The Mothe sisters agree to help lay the ghost to rest and begin to use every trick and deception at their disposal to convince the family that they are making contact with the spirit. Everything seems to be going well, until the ghost appears to start targeting the sisters themselves. Is the de Jacquinot house really haunted or is there another explanation for what is happening?

There seems to be a current trend for historical novels about mediums and séances; I can think of several I’ve read just in the last year or so, including Lucy Barker’s The Other Side of Mrs Wood and Ambrose Parry’s Voices of the Dead. What makes this one different is the structure and the idea of using two sisters to give alternate views of the same story – the first half of the book is narrated by Sylvie and the second half by Charlotte. I’m not sure how well this worked for me; it was interesting to see things from two such different perspectives, but by the time Charlotte’s narrative began I had become so absorbed in Sylvie’s story I struggled to adjust to a change of narrator.

Apart from the references to the French Revolution, I felt that the book lacked the strong sense of time and place I prefer and at times I even forgot that I was reading a story set in 19th century Paris and not Victorian London. I did love the good sister/bad sister theme, though – while at first it seems obvious that Sylvie is the good one and Charlotte the bad, as the novel continues we learn that things are not that simple and that we shouldn’t rely on just one point of view to give us the full picture. As a debut novel it was quite entertaining, with some interesting twists; I’m not sure whether I’ll read more books by Carmella Lowkis, but I could be tempted!

Thanks to Doubleday for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.