Unseen city A novel

Shearn's luminous latest (after The Mermaid from Brooklyn) follows a self-avowed librarian spinster; a man researching the history of his father's Crown Heights, Brooklyn, home; and the ghost of an orphaned girl from Civil War--era Manhattan. Meg Rhys lives in the perfect apartment: it's rent-controlled, close to her job at the Brooklyn Library, and also home to the ghost of her dead sister, Kate. When Meg's landlord decides to sell the building, Meg must face the dizzying and depressing prospect of finding a new apartment, the "lingua franca of New York." Meanwhile, widower Ellis Williams helps his father with his Crown Heights multifamily rental property, which has never been able to keep any tenants. The first floor rattles, there's a draft coming from nowhere, and the doors keep slamming when no one is around. When Ellis seeks Meg's help to research the building's history, the two stumble upon more than they bargained for. Interwoven with the contemporary narrative is the story of a girl whose orphanage burned down during the Draft Riots of 1863 and who then moved in with a new family in Weeksville, a settlement of free Blacks that existed in what is present-day Crown Heights. The presence of ghosts is easily believable, helped along by the characters' shared sense of grief. Shearn's nimble storytelling unearths a fascinating and fraught history. (Oct.)

A ghost story that focuses not on a single spirit but on an entire city whose layered history haunts its occupants. "Meg had the unsettling sense that she was seeing all the layers of the city transposed over one another, like scrims in a play going haywire." Meg Rhys proudly carries her "Spinster Librarian card" and does not believe in love, thank you very much. Instead she believes in ghosts, and in New York City there is no shortage of phantasmal company. Haunted by (accompanied by?) the ghost of her sister, who died at 25, Meg armors herself with the weapons that might otherwise be used to attack her: She's 40 and single, she's a librarian, and she has a cat named Virginia Wolf (a misspelling only Meg finds funny as well as a wink toward Shearn's fondness for multi-comma'd sentences). When handsome Ellis Williams approaches Meg at her Brooklyn library to help him uncover the truth about a rental property his father owns in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the circumstances seem ripe for a traditional romantic comedy--that is if their trauma and grief weren't compounded by the occult. The two of them undertake an obsessive research project as they peel back the layers of the house, and the city itself. Largely focused on Meg, the omniscient narrator occasionally switches to the perspective of a young Black girl whose story is slowly revealed. At times Shearn's exploration of topics as weighty as gentrification, police brutality, and Black trauma comes off oversimplified and overfiltered by the White heroine. That said, it is clear that Shearn has done her research--and details about the free Black settlement Weeksville in particular are treated with sensitivity and knowledge. Ultimately, the novel is as much a haunting by the geography of New York as it is the story of a few souls who live--or have lived--there. Like the ghosts who inhabit its pages, the novel lingers long after you've put it down. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

There once was a woman named Meg Rhys. Haunted houses became a particular problem for Meg Rhys just after she turned forty, at the exact moment when--though it was true that she lived with only a fickle housecat and towers of books for company-- it no longer seemed funny to go on calling herself a spinster librarian. Not that anyone said "spinster" in twenty-first century New York City except for Meg herself and she said it ironically, the same way she ironically cultivated the silver streak in her hair, which she felt lent her the air of an otherworldly eccentric until the aforementioned birthday at which point the loss of pigment promptly ceased to seem intentional. Above all, Meg wanted the map of her life to be intentionally plotted, a course charted by her and her alone. But at forty it was too late to turn back--a hairstyle change would only attract the attention of nosy relatives certain that it signaled love or other retrograde "improvements"--and so she kept the piebald bun coiled around a Number 2 pencil that recalled to her the quiet pleasures of standardized tests. Equally symbolic was her bicycle with its Wicked-Witch-of-the-West basket, the bicycle itself a rickety second-hand number Meg had gotten good at riding while wearing the ankle-length skirts she wore not in an Orthodox or even Amish way but mostly for the swishy acoustics, weaving in and out of traffic entirely without imagining her body crushed by a box truck; she almost never thought about that at all anymore. The librarian in her knew that no story was only one story. Outside the other girls are giggling, twirling their hoops and sticks, their boots clacking against the flagstones. Their long stiff skirts swish as they move. Usually the yard is noisy with the clomping of horses and carriages battling Fifth Avenue, a rocky, rutted path that leads toward the new park up north; usually they hear medicine men and fruit sellers peddling their wares and herds of pigs snuffling along, the usual Manhattan cacophony. It's a dusty part of town, far north of where most of the grown-up business is conducted, down in the sewage-and-cat-carcass-strewn streets of Tammany Hall's domain. She can remember when she first came to the orphanage (in a spotty way--she remembers the orphanage seeming new and strange but can't recall what life had been like before, or where, or with whom) that the land was even wilder back then, the stately plantation house seeming to rise from the dirt as if Miss Murray and the Miss Shotwells had grown it from a seed. Since those days, the sound of new construction has rarely ceased. Today the street is eerily still, though no one seems to notice but her. She and Jane usually like leaning against the fence and peeking through the holes to catch a glimpse of the occasional pairs of fancy ladies promenading in hoop skirts and lacy parasols, making up stories about what they will do when they are fancy ladies themselves. But today something is different, as if her interior mope has transformed into weather. The sky presses down, gray as the woolen blankets on their cots. She notices after a moment that the air smells different than usual. She turns to an older girl. Tillie, does it smell like burning to you? Tillie shrugs, Another slum fire down in Five Points, I wager. She nods, though she is not satisfied with the answer. Excerpted from Unseen City by Amy Shearn All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.