Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was wandering the shelves at Barnes & Noble and found this book, face out on the shelf, and thank Pete it was.
I loved this crooked tale of orphans, mothers, speaking with the dead, the influence of the dead on the living, cons, religion, and upstate New York. I loved that dear, dirty Worcester, Massachusetts made a cameo as the hometown of Tonya, an orphan in the same house as Nat and Ruth. Samantha Hunt does a fantastic job of weaving the story in the past (Nat and Ruth’s) with the present, where Ruth and her niece Cora take off across New York State on an epic quest, made moreso by the fact that they walk most of the journey and Cora does it heavily pregnant. The action happens along two strands of a DNA double helix connected by Ruth. So the storylines are fantastic, well-told, and her language sparkles: I love that Ceph, another orphan, is characterized as “angry enough to deform DNA.”
Beautiful book, so glad I stumbled across it.