The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

Adrift. Patient readers who enjoy historical fiction and who can tolerate a disjointed narrative are those most likely to enjoy reading Valerie Martin’s novel, The Ghost of the Mary Celeste. The Mary Celeste was a ship found adrift and seaworthy in the Atlantic in 1872 with no crew or passengers on board and one lifeboat missing. Martin takes that true event, and offers this novel as an exploration of what happened. Along the way, she introduces the spiritualism movement of that time as well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote a fictional piece about the Mary Celeste himself in 1884, and became involved with spiritualism in the 1920s. Martin riffs on all these threads in the novel, and creates the atmosphere of the time with her descriptive prose. My patience was strained often while I read this novel, and by the end was pleased only that I finished. Rating: Three-star (It’s ok) Click here to purchase The Ghost of the Mary Celeste from amazon.com.