Blackwater Spirits

With her series of books that feature the spirited librarian Glynis Tryon, Miriam Grace Monfredo takes her readers into the life of the small town of Seneca Falls, New York, a microcosm of mid-nineteenth-century America. Seneca Falls Inheritance illuminates the birth of the struggle for the rights of women; in North Star Conspiracy, Glynis is involved in the turbulence resulting from the fact that Seneca Falls was a stop on the "Underground Railway" for escaping slaves. Now Monfredo continues her stirring story of Glynis's life and the country's history. In Blackwater Spirits, Jacques Sundown, the half-Iroquois deputy, is accused of murder, and his trial points up the fear and prejudice felt for Native Americans, while Monfredo, with impeccable historianship, clearly shows the Indians' side of the cultural clash. The author also introduces a young female physician, initially resented not only as an intruder in the jealously guarded male profession, but as a Jew from New York City to boot. And as a seriocomic reflection of the times, the inhabitants of Seneca Falls are aroused, pro and con, by the rage for spiritualism and the passions of the Temperance movement.