after the success of A Christmas Carol. One could hope that Nancy Bilyeau’s The Ghost of Madison Street is so successful that she’ll feel tempted to write another next year.
Ms. Bilyeau has crafted a charming little tale (and my main complaint about this tale is that it’s too short—which is also in keeping with tradition) of a lonely widowed librarian who goes to work in the private, cathedral-like library of the fabulously wealthy, fabulously powerful J. P. Morgan, who really was a fabulous personage at the turn of the century. But the librarian—Helen O’Neil has a secret which threatens her job and the peace of her family. She’s being haunted by a ghost—or is it a ghost, good Catholic girls don’t believe in ghosts, and she doesn’t know who she can share her secret with.
Nor is she an ordinary librarian. Her Irish-born mother, now dead, early on pronounced her aes sidhe, a fairy child, due to her uncanny skills with her hands, which was the reason she was hired by Morgan to begin with. Yet her secret and her attempts to confide it in her brothers and sisters only lead to resentment and recriminations, until she sees—well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it? I’ll only say that the lighting of the candle on Christmas Eve brings a beloved member of the family home.
Bilyeau brings love and understanding to the Irish of her native New York, and paints a picture which brings us close to that time while keeping it elusively distant: a masterful trick, and exactly the type of tale you’ll want to re-read, aloud, under the lights of the Christmas tree.
