THE SPIRIT BARES ITS TEETH

One by one, the students of Braxton’s Finishing School and Sanitorium for Veil-sick girls disappear, but their spirits remain, trapped and screaming—“HELP US.”

To escape a future of marriage and childbirth, 16-year-old transgender boy Silas needs a medium’s seal from the Royal Speaker Society, a mark granted exclusively to men ever since the Speaker Act of 1841 prohibited women from practicing spirit-work. With a seal as proof of his manhood, Silas can go wherever he wants, including medical school. When Silas is exposed after using a stolen identity to obtain a seal, he expects to hang for his crime. Instead, he’s forced into an engagement and attendance at Braxton’s, an institution that claims to cure girls afflicted with Veil sickness, “a sickness of the mind” said to afflict women who engage in spirit-work. Soon after his arrival, Silas learns that not only are the students subjected to abusive treatment, the ones who resist have been vanishing without a trace. Set in Victorian England, this paranormal alternate history follows an autistic protagonist in vivid first-person prose as he unravels the haunting secret of the missing students with the help of an unexpected partner who feels just as trapped as Silas does by societal rules. Flutters of romance and feelings of kinship offer moments of reprieve from the unflinching brutality of Silas’ reality. White wields prose like a scalpel, cutting deep and spilling guts with gruesome precision. The cast of characters is white.

Visceral and vindicating.