With Half-Life of a Stolen Sister, one can add Rachel Cantor (A Highly Unlikely Scenario) to the list of authors who have gleefully employed anachronisms in the service of a historical novel. Her subject is the Brontë family or, rather, a fictionalized version known as the Bronteys but with the same given names: Charlotte, Emily, Anne, Maria, Elizabeth, and Branwell, "the Only Boy." It's never clear what era this is, but that's part of the fun. Characters use Victorian locutions such as, "Dear Lady, How I long to meet you." That's a line from a personal ad written by the family's widowed patriarch. Other characters eat canned dinners of "spaghettios," wear headsets, ride the subway--the unnamed setting feels like New York--and take soy milk with their tea.
Cantor also plays with form, with chapters written as a play, an e-mail exchange, a diary entry, and even a radio interview with the editor of novels written by the three Bells. The last is one of Cantor's many knowing references to the real Brontës: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne published novels and poetry as a trio of men known as the Bells. That's one of the themes that emerges here: the history of sexism in publishing and elsewhere, with the anachronisms suggesting that what was true in the Brontës' time hasn't fully ended. Readers familiar with the Brontë works will appreciate this novel more than those who aren't, but it's a clever work by one of America's most original stylists. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer