Listen, I know it’s a bit late, but I’m finally getting back to you on those book recommendations. I just finished reading a novel called The Devil in the White City, and I’m pretty sure that you would find it quite interesting. The book is set around the time of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and follows the parallel paths of Daniel Burnham, the fair’s architect, and H. H. Holmes, a prolific serial killer who used the fair’s magnetic allure to find his victims. Burnham’s storyline is about the obstacles they needed to overcome in order to establish the World’s Fair and keep it running smoothly. I found the parts about Burnham incredibly boring, so I’m not really going to talk about them very much. His sections of my novel were mainly focused
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At first glance, you wouldn’t think that it has anything in common with The Devil in the White City, but they both revolve around similarly perplexing mysteries. Before I get into whether or not you should read it, I’ll tell you a little bit about the plot. The protagonist of the novel is Dellarobia Turnbow, a Tennessee woman who, after getting pregnant at seventeen, was trapped in a loveless marriage on a farm that isn’t doing so hot either. Feeling trapped in her boring life, Dellarobia wanted to an affair with a young telephone repairman, but before she could, she had what she believed to be a religious vision telling her that she was making a mistake. In order to decrease their crushing debt Dellarobia’s father in law, Bear, makes a deal with a logging company to have all of the trees on a nearby mountain cut down. This happens to be the same mountain where Dellarobia had her vision of what she thought was some kind of fire, so they decide to investigate further before going ahead with their plan. It turns out that the orange “flames” that Della observed were actually a huge swarm of monarch butterflies, a discovery that would divide their small town. Bear wanted to go ahead with the logging (because, as we established, he is deeply in debt), but many other people in the town believed that the butterflies were some kind of gift from god. This sets off a wild chain of events
At first glance, you wouldn’t think that it has anything in common with The Devil in the White City, but they both revolve around similarly perplexing mysteries. Before I get into whether or not you should read it, I’ll tell you a little bit about the plot. The protagonist of the novel is Dellarobia Turnbow, a Tennessee woman who, after getting pregnant at seventeen, was trapped in a loveless marriage on a farm that isn’t doing so hot either. Feeling trapped in her boring life, Dellarobia wanted to an affair with a young telephone repairman, but before she could, she had what she believed to be a religious vision telling her that she was making a mistake. In order to decrease their crushing debt Dellarobia’s father in law, Bear, makes a deal with a logging company to have all of the trees on a nearby mountain cut down. This happens to be the same mountain where Dellarobia had her vision of what she thought was some kind of fire, so they decide to investigate further before going ahead with their plan. It turns out that the orange “flames” that Della observed were actually a huge swarm of monarch butterflies, a discovery that would divide their small town. Bear wanted to go ahead with the logging (because, as we established, he is deeply in debt), but many other people in the town believed that the butterflies were some kind of gift from god. This sets off a wild chain of events