The Unsuitable
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Molly Pohlig's The Unsuitable is a fierce blend of Gothic ghost story and Victorian novel of manners that’s also pitch perfect for our current cultural moment.
Iseult Wince is a Victorian woman perilously close to spinsterhood whose distinctly unpleasant father is trying to marry her off. She is awkward, plain, and most pertinently, believes that her mother, who died in childbirth, lives in the scar on her neck.
Iseult’s father parades a host of unsuitable candidates before her, the majority of whom Iseult wastes no time frightening away. When at last her father finds a suitor desperate enough to take Iseult off his hands—a man whose medical treatments have turned his skin silver—a true comedy of errors ensues.
As history’s least conventional courtship progresses into talk of marriage, Iseult’s mother becomes increasingly volatile and uncontrollable, and Iseult is forced to resort to extreme, often violent, measures to keep her in check.
As the day of the wedding nears, Iseult must decide whether (and how) to set the course of her life, with increasing interference from both her mother and father, tipping her ever closer to madness, and to an inevitable, devastating final act.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pohlig's uneven debut fuses romantic comedy and gothic horror in a tale of family trauma. Iseult Wince, an unmarried 28-year-old woman, lives with her cruel father, Edward, and nurturing housekeeper, Mrs. Pennington, in late 1880s England. Iseult, convinced she murdered her mother Beatrice during childbirth, spends her days conversing with the dead woman in her mind. When Beatrice's voice overwhelms her, Iseult finds relief by stabbing herself with needles and other sharp objects. Edward, meanwhile, determines to rid himself of his lone daughter and hosts a series of dinners with potential suitors. All result in failure until Iseult meets Jacob Vinke, the son of a lawyer, whose skin holds a glint of silver due to treatment for a medical condition. Jacob's family, recognizing their own damaged goods, decides to take on Iseult as daughter-in-law, and as she and her fianc near their wedding date, Beatrice crowds Iseult's head with worry, Edward belittles her, and Mrs. Pennington works overtime to keep her on track to escape her father's torture. While repetitive chapters with Iseult and Beatrice break the spell of the Victorian ghost story, Pohlig handles the wry set pieces of ill-fated courtship with aplomb, and the novel eventually gains momentum through a bloody series of twists and turns. Pohlig's antimarriage plot will interest fans of revisionist gothic fiction.
