Status
Call number
Collection
Original publication date
Publication
Description
Bridie Devine--female detective extraordinaire--is confronted with the most baffling puzzle yet: the kidnapping of Christabel Berwick, secret daughter of Sir Edmund Athelstan Berwick, and a peculiar child whose reputed supernatural powers have captured the unwanted attention of collectors trading curiosities in this age of discovery. Winding her way through the labyrinthine, sooty streets of Victorian London, Bridie won't rest until she finds the young girl, even if it means unearthing a past that she'd rather keep buried. Luckily, her search is aided by an enchanting cast of characters, including a seven-foot tall housemaid; a melancholic, tattoo-covered ghost; and an avuncular apothecary. But secrets abound in this foggy underworld where spectacle is king and nothing is quite what it seems.… (more)
Awards
Original language
Language
ISBN
Similar in this library
Media reviews
User reviews
Detectives don't wear crinolines; at least Bridie Devine doesn't, as she is a practical woman who likes to be able to 'fit through doorways, climb stairs and breathe'. Her odd childhood has fitted her for a career that mostly consists of working our how people have died, but this time she is investigating the kidnapping of a baronet's secret child, assisted by the ghost of a professional boxer who claims to have known her when she was a child.
I liked it and wouldn't mind reading more of Bridie's adventures if the author decides to continue her story.
Now, admittedly, this isn't going to be everyone's cup of
The setting was an atmospheric wonder. This is directly because of the description-heavy writing style, and I understand why some would find the focus on descriptions annoying. Still, it only helped me feel wrapped in this Victorian gothic mystery. I felt like I was in Maris House or Alberny Hall.
And the characters! I love Bridie Devine. I love Cora Butter. I was even captivated by Gideon Eames and Mrs. Bibby. And Ruby Doyle???? That ghost stole the damn show for me. Potentially my favorite character I've encountered in a book this year. These characters have layers. I loved that. Christabel felt more like a chess piece than a character- she could have been replaced with a rare artifact or the holy grail- but for me, the story wasn't about her. It was about slowly peeling back the layers between all the other characters and picking apart the web that connected them.
Listen, I don't want to give away too much of what happens in this book. I will warn that if you're going into this expecting a more traditional detective mystery type book, you will not find that. This is a book about characters living in a cruel world, with some slivers of light shining through, and where everything is not what it first seems.
Sir Edmund Berwick's cabinet included his adopted "daughter", a young girl with
Generally, the story moved steadily along but occasionally bogged down when I was introduced to her back story in chapters interspersed throughout the book. However, these chapters were necessary in that they explained Bridie's relationship with an adversary from her past. Bridie and her entourage were so well created that I wanted to hang-out with them. The book hinted at a sequel at its end, which I hope happens.
‘Things in Jars’ by Jess Kidd was an atmospheric blend of a grimy Victorian London setting and a dark fairytale in the form of a mystery.
Bridie Divine, our strong-willed female detective, is an interesting and layered main character. Bouncing back and forth in time was fascinating in
Additionally, Bridie’s companions are wonderful. Cora and Ruby really added an extra sprinkling of charm.
I picked this up because I wanted some historical fiction to usher in Autumn (a bit ahead of schedule). This definitely delivered. It’s rainy, chilly and has a real sense of the macabre. It was a good one to get lost in, and I settled in, indulging in hundred page chunks, till it was finished. Very enjoyable. I even shed a few tears in the end.
Things in Jars was not at all something I would usually pick, but I am so glad I stepped outside my comfort zone and dived into this dark, gory, Victorian fantasy. I loved the characters, I loved the story, and I loved the details that the author included with respect to the medical establishment...even tho it would be a far stretch to call this "historical" fiction. The atmosphere that Kidd created was tremendous, and I loved that she conjured up settings of London, Liverpool, Dublin and other places without resorting to popular cliches that make Victorian settings such a drab in lesser books.
Despite the squalor, gory details of the scenes, the cruelty displayed, and the general meanness of some of the characters, there was a whole lot of warmth in this story, too, and that made the book for me.
Things in Jars was not perfect, but I really liked it.
As with all terrible, wondrous sights, there is a jolt of shock, then a hypnotic fascination, then the uneasy queasiness, then the whole thing starts again; the desire to look and the desire never to have looked in the first place.
Don't know how Kidd comes up with the story ideas she has, but I've enjoyed all three of her very different books. This is a dark London, a hidden London where many things go unnoticed and unreported. Bridie has her hands full and a very interesting back story. The ghost insists she knows him from the past, but she doesn't remember,though by books end that will change. The mood, the atmosphere, the gothic storytelling aided in my quest to know how's the author would bring this all together. She does, in a thriller sty!e with an emotional edge.
One can't help wondering where this author will take us next, or if this might be the start of a series featuring Bridie. Time will tell.
The coal smoke and fog of London, complete with its olfactory smorgasbord of industry and market, the filthy Thames and its dung-filled streets, the miasma blamed for cholera and other deadly diseases is vividly described.
The novel is Victorian in writing style, with Dickensian descriptions and sensational penny dreadful worthy murderous villains. It is populated with Resurrectionists, mudlarks, people with false identities, and avid collectors of curiosities--things in jars.
Sir Edmund has an extensive collection of aquatic life--aberrations--things in jars, including the Winter Mermaid, the Irish merrow specimen that went missing long ago. The fishy merrow could take on female human form, beautiful but dangerous killers. Sir Edmund's reclusive, 'singular daughter' has disappeared, along with her nurse and the doctor. Sir Edmund won't share details, but he is desperate to find Christabel.
Here is time held in suspension. Yesterday picked. Eternity in a jar. ~from Things in Jars by Jess Kidd
Sir Edmund has called detective Bridie Devine to find the missing girl.
Bridie's early childhood was spent with a resurrectionist--once a man of science before ruined by drink and gambling--who taught her how to determine how long a body had been dead. Then a gentleman doctor took her from the streets to groom as his assistant. Now, she helps the police, "working out how people died." She failed to find her last kidnapped child case, and perhaps that failure was why she was chosen for this case.
Bridie is a wonderful character. Like Sherlock Holmes, she dons disguises, she is identified by her choice of hat, and smokes a pipe. She is also quite modern, railing against societal restraints on women, the 'market price' of their value. Middle age is creeping up--is it too late for a lover? Ruby Doyle's ghost has been following her, claiming they had a history; there is an affection between them. Who was he?
Kidd captures a time when Darwin's theory is breaking news and science and pseudoscience is all the rage. I love the novels and era that inspired this novel, and I love this novel, too.
I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.
Thanks to the author, Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.
Bridie Devine, an Irish orphan, has grown up to become a detective and she has just been hired to find a young girl who has
As Bridie begins investigating the kidnapping, readers are privy to bits of her life in the past and eventually will learn how her past merges with her present case. Along the way, she is accompanied by a ghostly spirit, Ruby, who has a strong connection to Bridie from her days in Ireland.
I absolutely loved this story! Jess Kidd wrote such vivid descriptions, that I felt as if I were actually haunting the Victorian streets of London along with Bridie and Ruby. I hope Kidd is planning a sequel. This book will be one of my favorites of 2020.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for allowing me to read an advance copy and give my honest review.
The content explores the darkness of human nature, reflecting society's fascination with
The story is wholly unique, incredibly strange, and yet thoroughly engaging and, yes, believable.
I loved all the characters! I hated arriving at the last page, because I didn't want to say goodbye to them all.
This is the type of book that holds you captive. It's one with which you take your time and savor. Things in Jars is a vacation for the mind.
*I received a review copy via Amazon Vine.*
What's not to love? 1863 Victorian England, a female private investigator named Bridie Devine, curiosity collectors and a baffling new case.
Young
Bridie was such a wonderfully wrought lead character. Bright, tough, accepting, but with hidden wounds in her soul. Those scars figure into the dark plot line that runs parallel to the investigation. Bridie's companions are a ghost named Ruby that only she can see and a bearded, seven foot maid named Cora. Additional supporting players are just as well drawn.
Kidd's writing is absolutely fantastic - she captures Victorian England in every passage. Descriptions of time and place conjure up smoky alleyways, dark rooms, fog on the River Thames, questionable activities, Resurrection Men and more. The dialogue is true to the time, flowery and detailed
Kidd unfurls the mystery slowly, adding in new paths and people along the way. Things in Jars is a journey to be savoured and enjoyed. Mystery, history, fantasy all take turns in Things in Jars, but it is Bridie and her companions that stayed with me after the last chapter ended.
I chose to listen to Things in Jars. The reader was Jacqueline Milne and she was brilliant. The lilt and movement of her voice captured the time, the characters and the plot so very, very well. Her voice supports the magical, fantasy feel of Things in Jars. She provided many different voices for assorted characters that matched the mental images I had created. Her voice was pleasant to listen. Absolutely recommended.
The main character is Bridie (short for Bridget) Devine, around 30 years old, who is a doughty and eccentric Irish lass living with her seven-foot tall housemaid Cora and working as a detective for hire. Bridie has a talent for the reading of corpses, and thus Scotland Yard passes her the odd case. She has two suitors: one living and one dead. Inspector Valentine Rose of Scotland Yard has the advantage of being alive, but her dead suitor, Ruby Doyle, a former boxer, has a hold on her heart. Alas, they can’t even embrace.
As the story begins, Bridie is hired to help find the kidnapped daughter of Sir Edmund Athelstan Berwick. Christabel, age six, was taken from her nursery, and Sir Edmund sent his physician, Dr. Harbin, to hire Bridie to help find her. Dr. Harbin won’t tell Bridie much about Christabel except that “the child has singular traits” which he won’t enumerate.
As Bridie goes about her investigation, she is aided by both Cora and by Ruby, whom she first encounters resting against a tombstone smoking a pipe. He is transparent, but handsome, and claims he and Bridie know each other. He shows her his headstone: “Here lies Ruby Doyle, Tattooed Seafarer and Champion Boxer.” He had been dead half a year, killed in a bar brawl. But Bridie’s memory won’t be jogged. Regardless, he begins to accompany her and provide companionship to her, and they grow close.
The author’s colorful descriptions of the sights and smells of Victorian London are a wonder. Humorously, she includes both Bridie’s contemptuous perspective and Ruby’s laudatory one. Bridie is usually proclaiming disgust over the unpleasant odors in the street, from the sweat of unwashed workers to the reek of the polluted Thames River. But Ruby, who can no longer smell anything in any event, is nostalgic for all of it, as expressed in this passage:
“The street is hopping: the living swarm before Ruby’s dead eyes - street peddlers doing the go-around with trays of oranges and nuts; street performers limbering; kitchen maids sallying forth with market baskets, eyeing the ribbon vendors and eluding the coalmen. Tribes of pickpockets, fleet-footed miscreants, thread through the traffic. Here trots a dapper wag, high collar, and resplendent whiskers. There steps a blue-eyed beauty in a fetching bonnet. Ruby wishes himself a frock coat and new top hat, a hot shave and a good breakfast, a scarlet cravat, a pair of kid gloves, and a pocket watch. He would give the world just to saunter out onto the streets as a living man again, to look and be looked at.”
As they walk through the streets together, Bridie envisions what it would be like to grow old with Ruby and their “rabble of dark-eyed children.” For his part, Ruby conjures up an image of “their raucous children, green eyed, please God.” Both fantasize about physical contact, and both get watery eyes over their fruitless imaginings. It could break your heart in two.
Meanwhile, Bridie picks up clues as to Cristabel’s whereabouts. The net of suspects widens, and the story goes back and forth in time to flesh out their backgrounds as well as that of Bridie. We also learn about the Resurrectionists, who play a supporting role in the story. These were gravediggers commonly employed by anatomists in the United Kingdom during the 18th and 19th centuries to exhume the bodies of the recently dead for research. Most impressively, the author includes a riff between two prison guards that mirrors the similar scene of comic relief by the gravediggers in Hamlet, Act V. It is doubly pleasurable for any who catch the reference.
All of the cruelness and horror depicted by the author is juxtaposed by the tenderness and humanity of Bridie and the other “good” characters. It is a truly masterful symphony of impressions and emotions, and the language is so evocative you may think you are watching a movie rather than reading a book. I particularly liked her description of apothecaries, showing both the beauty and the humor of her writing:
“[Apothecaries were] gatekeepers to an esoteric world of unguents and potions and powders. They sold opiate dreams for fractious babies to exhausted mothers, or ointments to unfaithful husbands with the itch. They poisoned and cured in equal measure and everything they dispensed came with a good old-fashioned bracing purgative.”
Evaluation: Jess Kidd is an excellent writer, and for those who enjoy good literature with an Irish flavor and a page-turning plot, this book will not disappoint. Highly recommended!
Kidd's most irritating descriptive device is telling the reader to "look," which adds to the sense that Kidd is churning out words like notes from a calliope. Present: every last Victorian trope, including a street urchin named Jem, evil dissecting doctors, cannibalistic bakers, collectors of the macabre, and circus weirdos.
All this excess is compensated for by the protagonist, round Irish redhead and pipe-smoker Bridget "Bridie" Devine, investigator. Like Mrs. Muir, Bridie's love interest is a ghost, but not a sea captain, thank goodness. There is more than enough of the sea in the book, from the architecture to the "merrow" (a kind of monster-mermaid child) whose kidnapping kickstarts the plot. The lover-ghost is Ruby Doyle, late boxer, who is good at snappy dialogue but no good at finding out helpful information. Far more interesting is Cora, Bridie's 7-foot housemaid and ex-circus "giantess."
While the novel has some weaknesses, I'd be happy to see this grow into a series. However outrageous the conveyance, if Bridie is driving, we are going places.
I received an advanced readers copy of this book from the publisher and Netgalley and was encouraged to submit a review.
This was a really interesting book. It was tremendously atmospheric, with rich descriptions of Victorian London and the environments in which the characters find themselves. While I found the discussions of medicine and collecting in Victorian England really fascinating--they were what originally led me to take an interest in this book--I think that there was just a few too many magical and supernatural elements in this book for me to absolutely love it. I really do think, though, that someone with more general interest in/tolerance for magical realism would likely enjoy this book a lot, as the plot and atmosphere were generally compelling, and the story definitely had a number of twists that I hadn't anticipated.
I recently finished Fingersmith, which shared the Victorian English setting, so perhaps I would have been more impressed by the descriptions of the time and setting if I hadn’t just had that excellent recent example to compare to.
The narrative shifts between two timelines, and maybe because I was listening rather than reading, I found these shifts somewhat difficult to follow. The dates are clearly given—it’s not one of those books that leaves you to figure out from context when things are taking place—so it was clearly my lack of attention.
The characters were interesting and nicely drawn, if somewhat larger than life. The merrow was a fascinating character, as was the protagonist Bridie Devine. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with how some of the plot threads were resolved, which is why I’m not rating this a full four stars.
This is a weird and fascinating novel, dark and magical and very hard to categorize. The writing is particularly remarkable, because it often seems as if it should come across as contrived, silly, even purple. And yet somehow it really, really works. I don't know how Jess Kidd pulls that off, but my hat's off to her for managing it, and for creating something this weirdly compelling with it.
Rating: 4/5, but I'm seriously tempted to kick it up another half star.
The book opens with Bridie (Brigit) Devine in her widow's cap approached by a well-muscled ghost with tattoos who encounters her in a church graveyard. Bridie is not enamored of Ruby, though she is curious about him, especially because she is investigating the skeletons/corpses of a woman and her child, both with very sharp teeth and other strange anomalies, walled up in the church basement.
Who Bridie is becomes part of the story in chapters that start 20 years before, where she is an orphan from 1840's pre-Famine Ireland taken in by her Gan while he introduces her to anatomy and studies of the human form. The adult Bridie walks the streets of London with her pipe and her mind and her memories, and assisting in the recovery of a very strange, missing child that seems to be more myth than real.
The missing child is the daughter of Sir Edmund and the playfellow of Dr. Harbin, who was sent to hire her for the search. But things are not as they seem, and her new-found friend (and ghost) Ruby is assisting her in her efforts even if no one else can see him. Or his various tattoos that shift and move and communicate his thoughts without words.
There are some cautions in this tale: death is very prevalent, and there is an incident of animal cruelty as well as Victorian operating procedures pre-anesthesia. Most of them take place in the household were Bridie is raised, that of prominent physician Dr. Eames and his psychopathic (also well-described) wife and son, during the Before passages.
How this tale is woven, how language is used, and Bridie herself are quite memorable and it is definitely a book I am glad I read.
Here, Jess Kidd creates a darkly poetic and watery tale. At it’s heart: Bridie Devine, formerly a resurrectionist’s girl, then a medic’s trusted extra hands, and finally a private detective with a penchant for mind altering blends of tobacco and
I felt like I shouldn’t like this (this is a tale firmly rooted in the supernatural), but I definitely did.
-- What’s it about? --
Things that should not exist.
Irish folklore and myth. Men and women who live and breathe violence, anomalies and deceit.
Gideon Eames, a man who will open you up just to see what your insides look like, and the sublimely unperturbed Mrs Bibby, a woman with pus claimed toes and a leg badly in need of amputation, whose cunning and malevolence means she may yet outlive the rest of the cast...
When Sir Edmund Berwick hires Bridie Devine to find his stolen daughter, Christabel, Bridie soon realises that Sir Edmund is a collector of water based curiosities and Christabel may not be his daughter at all.
Can Bridie locate the young girl? Can rumours of Christabel’s terrifying talents possibly be true? And what will Bridie do with Christabel if she does find her?
-- What’s it like? --
Poetical. Intense. Fantastical.
A wonderful depiction of the nonchalance of true evil in an openly brutal era. Oh, and it’s funny, too.
Written in the present tense throughout, except for the regular flashbacks to Bridie’s adolescence, the expansive narrative voice turns London and it’s ancient rivers into a character equally as much as a passing raven. This approach can sometimes lead to a little confusion about happenings, but it does make for a wonderfully lyrical narrative.
-- A very few favourite quotes: --
‘The servants slumber on...The cook snores fruity, unpeeled and well-soaked under warm sheets, as solid and brandy-scented as plum pudding. She dreams of matchless soufflés; she hunts them down as she sails in a saucepan over a gravy sea.’
‘Sir Edmund’s home is an architectural grotesque, the ornate façade the unlikely union of a war-ship and a wedding cake.’
‘Sir Edmund has done wrong in his collecting. He has been ruminating on his wrong-doing and on the punishments (legal and spiritual) he might reasonably expect. And so rounding the house in a heightened state of remorse and morbid dread, Sir Edmund readily mistakes Bridie Devine for a retributive being of the underworld. A banshee perhaps, or a malevolent imp; it is dusk and her bonnet has the air of a demonic presence perching mid-flight. It takes Bridie several minutes to coax the baronet out of an hydrangea.’
‘The back gates are open. They pass through them and follow the road round, with the high wall bordering Sir Edmund’s estate to their left and the woods to their right. The autumn colours are rich in the early sun, with golden tones and deep reds and startling oranges against a rinsed blue sky. The air is rowdy with birdsong.
‘'Clean air: a tonic to the lungs,’ says Ruby. ‘What does it smell like, Bridie?’
‘'Leaf mould, cow shit and this fella’s feet.’'
-- Final thoughts --
A deeply enjoyable read, for the wonderfully arranged words, the flashes of humour and bathos, the strange-but-recognisably-dark-and-filthy-Victorian-atmosphere and the memorable characters. All these wonderfully effective aspects of Kidd's writing kept me hooked, rather more than for the story itself, which is in places a little predictable and in other places has, perhaps, an unnecessary flourish or two. What, exactly, was the point of Bad Dorcas’ last story? But maybe in seeking a point I am missing a point: that this is at least partly a story about the power of stories.
Keep an eye out for the ghost in top hat, drawers and loose laced boots. This is the point at which I feel I would have given up on most books featuring a ghost, but Kidd's style kept me enjoying the narration to the end.