Sally Emerson

Making an unplanned visit to her mother’s restaurant late one night, fifteen year-old Jennifer Hamilton is shocked to surprise her mother with a lover. Jennifer lives in a very rich and private world of literary fantasy. She has little interest in boys as she regularly holds conversations with the poet Shelley, while another of her friends is the 17th century playwright and spy Mrs Aphra Behn, the subject of her father’s recently published biography.

The fact that Jennifer has the gift of ‘second sight’ lends a pleasing ambiguity to her communications with these historical figures. Less easy for Jennifer to reach is her friend Rebecca who was killed much more recently in a road accident, suggesting that Jennifer’s fantasies serve as an emotional ‘bandage’ insulating her from reality and feelings which she’s unable to deal with.

Jennifer’s greatest ambition is to hold a séance with Mr Davidson, the clairvoyant who lives across the square, so that he can cause the ghosts of all three of her dead friends to materialise so that others can see them.

Against his instincts, her father has been asked to write a book about the recent murder of a young woman. The young man accused of the murder can only offer as a defence some vague and unconvincing story about a burglar, while the situation is complicated by his glamorous and hysterical sister Lucinda writing letters to the prosecuting attorney, declaring her brother’s innocence while claiming an incestuous relationship with him.

The plot thickens when Jennifer’s mother takes a new lover, Paul, who had previously had relationships with both Lucinda and the murdered girl.

There are some first novels so accomplished that you know you’ll have to find more by that author: Rosalind Ashe’s Moths, Yaba Badoe’s True Murder, and Sally Emerson’s Second Sight are three such novels.… (meer)