Pinkerton's Sister by Peter Rushforth

Trapped in a suffocating life of convention and party chatter, Alice Pinkerton has turned to the liberating worlds she finds in literature. Like a character from one of her favorite novels, Alice holds a biting, eccentric, but expansive view of life; she wears only white, has a stutter, and knows her peers call her a madwoman in the attic. Various period cures-hydrotherapy, hypnotherapy, electrotherapy, a sanitarium-fail to turn this thirty-two-year-old, highly imaginative, caustically funny woman into one of the silly damsels of 1903's New York Society. Hauntingly, beneath all this lies a dark family secret.

Pinkerton's Sister is a novel for readers, who will thrill to recognize a kindred in Alice's references to our most beloved literary Jo March, Jane Eyre, Leo Bloom, and Hester Prynne, among many others, grace these pages. This intertextual, playful work certainly qualifies as "the ultimate book-geek's guilty pleasure" (Creative Loafing Atlanta).