Just Jennifer

A Reunion of Ghosts by Judith Claire Mitchell (Harper, March 2015)

The Alter sisters, Lady, Vee and Delph are perfectly delightful if somewhat quirky, to those who know them.  As they approach their mid-fifties and the turn of the twentieth-century they are living together in their family’s Upper West Side apartment and have decided their lives will end as the twentieth-century comes to a close.  But first they need a suicide note, outlining the reasons for their decisions, reasons that stretch back generations to their great-grandfather who was considered by some to be a brilliant scientist and whose inventions and discoveries help people to kill each other more efficiently.  Living with the lore of bad luck and many familial suicides, including their own mother, the sisters feel that the sins, in this case of the great-grandfather, are visited in the next several generations---much like the Kennedys, and decide this curse must end with them.  A mysterious turn of events that begins in a September storm calls into question everything the sisters have learned and believed of their heritage and might---just might---give them a way out of their fate.

A detailed, deeply felt portrait of multiple generations of one family, A Reunion of Ghosts seamlessly, with gorgeous prose, intertwines the lives of historical figures with fictional characters as a family tree of sadness and bad luck is traced by three beguiling, very funny women, who ingeniously use a suicide note for three to define their family and its roll in events of the twentieth century.