I’m not an avid historical fiction reader but when a book cover has the line “Send a woman to do a man’s job”, I can’t help but be enticed to find out just what ‘man’s job’ benefits from a woman’s touch!
This book explores the fascinating world of Victorian funeral customs and features Sydney's first female undertaker. Tatiana Caldwell's childhood in London is idyllic and filled with the love of doting parents. But when they die in quick succession, she's left heartbroken and destitute, and at seventeen emigrates to Sydney in 1864, determined to build a new, financially secure life for herself.
After an apprenticeship as an undertaker's assistant with Crowe Funeral Services, Tatty marries owner Titus Crowe. Titus himself soon dies and Tatty inherits the business and becomes Sydney's only female undertaker.
Her rivalry with a competing male run funeral service means she must find some gruesome secrets, a mission that takes her from the cemetery at midnight, to house-breaking, to Sydney's criminal court, to the lunatic asylum.
Black Silk and Sympathy is a riveting and realistic story of Sydney in the 1860s, of death laid out in front rooms, of funeral processions and mortuary trains, and of survival, reinvention and female determination in a male dominated world.
Waikato writer, Deborah Challinor is one of New Zealand’s best selling novelist, whose books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide. Black Silk and Sympathy is just the first in a series and I'm looking forward to some terrific ‘funereal’ adventures with Tatty at the head of the funeral procession.
