The Uninvited
Ivy Rowan and her mother tend to see “the uninvited” dead just before someone dies. So, in 1918, it’s no surprise that 25-year-old Ivy, who has been struck down by the Spanish Influenza, sees her dead grandmother. Her family has only recently received word of her brother’s death, in the war in Europe, and her old friends and neighbors in the small Illinois town where she lives are dying by the scores. Then Ivy’s brother and father stagger into the house after killing an innocent German immigrant shopkeeper. The American Protective League’s propaganda has made them into murderers. The senseless killing is more than Ivy can bear, and even though she is still wracked with the effects of the flu, she leaves her lifelong home.
Except for when she’s suddenly competent, mostly Ivy impotently protests the tragedies pulling her world apart: her father’s brutality, her one brother’s death in the war, and so many dying of the flu. When she begins to see the dead here and there, she knows that all that’s come before is just a prelude to even worse. (She’s right.)
Winters is a talented writer who takes her readers on an audacious ride with this book, her first novel written for an adult audience. The plotting is near perfect. The closer I got to the book’s denouement, the more I could see why Ivy had behaved as poorly as she did. That said, Ivy is exasperatingly immature, and both her actions and love affair are hard to swallow, at least in the beginning. Once the reader understands what Ivy’s up against, however, the book is so much fun that these complaints don’t feel as important. And the jazz club is a divine creation, worth the price of admission.
