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Book review: These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly

Josephine Montford (better known as "Jo") is a Montford by birth - one of the oldest, richest and most influential families in 1890's New York. She has lived a privileged life for the past seventeen years, wears the latest fashions, attends the most happening balls, and is about to be engaged to the scion of another rich and influential New York family. She should be happy and contented with her life, right? Nothing could be further from the truth, because Jo is not like the other society heiresses who cheerfully spend their time discussing inane topics such as tea parties, ball gowns, flower arrangements and eligible bachelors. She is a girl who is gifted with insatiable curiosity, sharp intelligence and a burning passion for truth, in an era when women are supposed to be docile, subservient and bound by rules of the society. 

Why is it, she wondered now, that boys get to do things and be things and girls only get to watch?

Any woman digressing from the accepted norms of behaviour or thinking faces social ruin, humiliation and even life-long detention in a mental asylum! Women are thought to be fragile beings, incapable of logical thinking or intelligent decision-making. A mere walk in the streets at night alone is enough to get a young woman branded as a woman of loose character or worse still, charged with insanity. In such a world, Jo is forced to keep her curiosity about the world outside her social circle carefully hidden, because she has been repeatedly warned about the consequences of being a non-conformist in society:

"You, on the other hand, wish to know things. And no one can forgive a girl for that."

"....That was what people did when they wanted to stop a girl from doing something—they shamed her.”

That doesn't stop Jo from being secretly inspired by the trailblazing American journalist, Nellie Bly, and her sensational expose on the inhuman treatment of inmates in a lunatic asylum, "Ten Days in a Mad-House". 

We who have means and a voice must use them to help those who have neither. Yet how can we help them if we don't even know about them? And how can we know about them if no one writes about them? Is it so wrong to want to know things?

Nelly Bly (1864-1922)

Things might still have continued normally with Jo accepting the inevitable and letting go of her dreams, if suddenly her father hadn't been found dead in his study, apparently having shot himself by accident. Jo and her mother are in a state of shock while her uncle helps them sort out her father's extensive business affairs. During a visit to a prominent newspaper office owned by her family, Jo by chance overhears a young reporter talking about how her father's death was actually a suicide but was hushed up by her influential family. Unable to believe her ears, Jo confronts the reporter, Eddie, to find out why he has reached such a conclusion. Little does she know that her chance encounter with Eddie will propel her into a world of people she has never encountered, situations she has never faced and secrets she has never dreamed of before! 

"The truth can be a hard thing, Jo. It’s often best left hidden."

What if everything she has ever known about the world and the people around her is a veneer? What if her father's death is not even a suicide but a murder? Who or what was her father scared of? Who is the man with the scar Jo keeps seeing everywhere? Who knows the truth and who is hiding it? 

The mysteries keep piling one on top of the other and more secrets keep tumbling out, as Jo joins forces with Eddie to find out the truth. As she delves deeper into the mystery, she also travels to the underbelly of New York - the slums, the dockyards, the brothels, the mental asylums. Eddie helps her see and experience things and perspectives to life that she has never come across in her sheltered world. She finds the outside world scary yet strangely fascinating - full of untold stories waiting to be told. She is no longer able to reconcile herself with having no life other than getting married and raising a family - she starts questioning more, she starts wanting more:

How did this happen? How did I get here? Jo asked herself. She didn’t want to do this. She wanted to be home. Safe inside her Gramercy Square town house...

Go back? How? There was no going back. Not to her old life of drawing rooms and dances. Not to Miss Sparkwell’s School. Not to her friends, or to Bram. It had all gone too far....

If only she could be bold enough, and brave enough, to claim the things she wanted: love, a purpose, a life. But could she be?

I loved how the author expertly binds two parallel tracts together - the mystery moves seamlessly on one hand, while on the other hand, Jo awakens to a new and often dangerous world outside her known boundaries, through her association with Eddie. I liked their slow-burn romance, often poignant because of its very implausibility:

He was a flame and she’d gotten burned, and the pain was terrible, yet it didn’t make the fire any less alluring.

I liked some of the secondary characters like Eddie's friend, the forensic expert Oscar Rubin, and his funny comments about human anatomy. I also loved the strange camaraderie and female kinship between Jo and the pickpocket girl, Fay - how both were constrained to do what society forced them to do, and how both longed for freedom, in spite of being from completely disparate backgrounds.

Little by little, Jo's sheltered life crumbles around her and she loses her naivete as her assumptions about people are challenged. She realizes that the past is not really buried and the dark alleys and shallow graves may yield their startling secrets after all:

"If you're going to bury the past, bury it deep..Shallow graves always give up their secrets."

As someone who has everything to lose - her reputation, her family, her riches, her love, her sanity and maybe even her life - can Jo dare to find out the truth? Will the truth ultimately make her or break her? Will she ever be able to write her own story?