Review: We Shall See the Sky Sparkling

We Shall See the Sky Sparkling by Susana Aikin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.5 Stars bumped to 4 because I love the story within the story of this book.

We Shall See the Sky Sparkling has its inception in a real life story. In a family history and simple photo, Aikin's idea behind this book struck home for me. I, too, have a beautiful photo of my great-grandaunt, a woman who died a spinster, at relatively young age, and the lack of information about her story has haunted me for years. In Aikin's story, more is known, thanks to her sleuthing, about her great-grandaunt, Lily Alexandra Throop. Lily left her family home in Manchester in the late 1890's, at the age of seventeen, without family blessing, to become an actress in London, a simply scandalous choice for a young woman in this era. Her peregrinations eventually led her to St. Petersburg in Russia, where she was rumored to have given birth to an illegitimate child. She later returned to England and died from tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-four. After finding a caches of thirteen letters that Lily wrote to her brother Harry and sister-in-law Alice, Aikin was able to piece together some of Lily's fascinating but tragically short life and build a novelization of it.

While I found some of the dialogue and manners in the novel didn't accurately reflect the Victorian and Edwardian era, overall, Lily's story is a haunting one. There are likely so many young women who didn't want to follow their narrow gender prescribed roles, and no doubt many whose lives ended sadly, as a result. In this era, where women were not permitted to own property, and were themselves counted as chattel of their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, Lily envisioned a different path for herself. She paid dearly for her choices but led a fascinating life while she lived it.

Margo (Margaret) Lapping

I received a Digital Review Copy of this book from Kensington Press via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

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