Affinity

in a nutshell: An awkward if earnest Victorian society lady decides to volunteer at a local women's prison as a visitor, in order to get out of the house and away from her mother's questions on when she plans to get married. While there, she becomes captivated by a beautiful young woman, a spiritualist, who is imprisoned for the supernatural death of a client when their attempts to communicate with the occult went terribly wrong. As you could probably gather from this being a Sarah Waters novel, lesbian yearning ensues, as the two plot a prison break and subsequent escape to America.

the vibes: Scam Goddess, but make it Victorian and more gay. Orange is the New Black, but make it spiritualist and less gay.

main themes: Spiritualism, limited roles and opportunities for women in the Victorian era, maybe a little prison reform (British version), historic homophobia, communicating with ghosts in the decades before ouija boards, and even more lesbian yearning!

the writing: Ms. Waters sure seems to know a lot about the Victorian era and she sure as shit knows gay yearning. She probably got all the parts concerning the Spiritualist movement right too, but I wouldn't be able to speak to that. I don't know, I generally am not drawn to period pieces so I do not know why I took the recommendation to read this, do not take my views on this seriously. A kindergartener's incoherent ramblings about their half-remembered nightmare would be spookier. I hated the main character because her naivety was almost too much to handle. The spiritualist parts were pretty interesting, but not enough to sustain the story. The cast of characters in the women's prison were fun, but they didn't get to do much (well, they were in prison, so, fair.) This book is probably perfectly up some peoples' alley but sadly not mine. (Though you would think so, spooky gay ladies are my jam!)

I made the mistake of packing this as my one book on vacation to a non-English country so I basically finished it out of lack of anything else to read by the pool. Sidenote: not a pool read at all, the drab nature of the story somehow kept me from fully tanning, I'm convinced.