Falling Angels

Tracy Chevalier's Falling Angels opens with the death of Queen Victoria, which sends families across Britain into cemeteries to mourn her passing. It is in one such cemetery that the Colemans and Waterhouses find themselves, and where the daughters, Maude and Lavinia, become fast friends. The mothers, in particular, are uneasy about this friendship, as the Colemans are the Waterhouses "betters." Despite the firm class strictures in Edwardian England, the girls remain steadfast friends through the years, often including the gravedigger's son, Simon, in their hijinks.

While the story is written from multiple viewpoints (the mothers, the daughters, the husbands, the servants, and even Simon all have their say), Kitty Coleman is the true protagonist around whom the core storylines spin. In an era in which women were supposed to be content simply to be content,  Kitty Coleman has never been content, not since she was made to stay at home while her brother went off to school. Having become a wife and mother out of obligations to her class and gender, she neither excels at nor enjoys either role, moving blandly through each day. Dissatisfied and, frankly, depressed, she gambles heavily on friendship with the manager of the local cemetery as well as on the women's suffrage movement. The consequences of these decisions unspool, unexpectedly and rather disastrously, throughout the last half of the novel.

I found the constant change in narration to be distracting at first; this was a hard book to get into and to feel any affinity for the characters. Ultimately, I was won over, though, and not only by the characters. The plot is well thought out, and I was especially taken with Chevalier's research and writing about the suffrage movement in the early years. Sylvia Pankhurst makes the expected appearance, but it's the day-to-day scenes of sewing banners and distributing pamphlets that bring the movement alive. If the plot is not quite as original as At the Edge of the Orchard, it is close, and in the end, I found I could not turn the pages and read the ending fast enough.

Four and a half stars.