The Welsh Fasting Girl

March 18, 2019
Set in the 1860s, this moving novel from O’Connor (Like China) exhumes the tragic mystery of a famous child who claims not to need nourishment. Journalist Christine Thomas crosses the Atlantic to escape the stagnation of her life in New York and to judge for herself the veracity of claims about the Welsh Fasting Girl. Twelve-year-old Sarah Jacobs had reportedly not eaten in 16 months out of her own volition, which some claim serves as proof of divine intervention in a politically, economically, and religiously divisive time in Wales. What begins as Christine’s quest to sort fact from fiction becomes a struggle for justice on Sarah’s behalf, both before and after the girl’s highly publicized death. The narrative combines Christine’s journals, contemporaneous reports (real and fictitious) by experts and journalists, and the remembrances of Sarah’s youngest sister, Margaret. O’Connor’s description of Sarah’s condition and Christine’s motivations as a concerned mother are highlights, even as the book’s latter half hinges on the minutiae of inconsistent reports from Sarah’s doctors and repetitive reinterpretations of the last days of Sarah’s life. Although hampered by a sluggish plot, O’Connor’s bleak, powerful story serves as an affecting homage to a girl whose community failed to protect her.

February 15, 2019
The author of The Master's Muse (2012) explores a Victorian craze.The "fasting girl" was one of the more horrifying phenomena of the Victorian era in the United Kingdom and the United States. These were little girls and young women who supposedly went for long periods of time without food or drink. Sarah Jacob, a girl living in rural Wales, stopped eating when she was 10 years old. Her home became a pilgrimage site. She was the subject of an article in The Lancet and something of an international sensation. More than a hundred weeks into her supposed fast, she died, and her parents were convicted of manslaughter. O'Connor (The Master's Muse, 2012, etc.) faced a number of challenges in turning this historical vignette into a novel. The first--and by no means the smallest--is that Sarah Jacob has already gotten the fiction treatment in Emma Donoghue's The Wonder (2016), a widely reviewed book by a bestselling author. The second is that Sarah Jacob is a child who spends two years lying in bed. If a story about her is going to succeed, the author either needs to take us into her world or surround her with characters who make compelling sense of her world. O'Connor doesn't quite manage either. The primary narrator--at the beginning, at least--is an American journalist whose husband died reporting on the Civil War. The editor of a Brooklyn newspaper sends her to write dispatches on this fasting girl. Christine's interactions with Sarah don't amount to much, though, nor do readers get much insight into Christine as a person. As the novel progresses, the author keeps adding points of view, but none of them get the reader any closer to the central mystery of Sarah's fast. Instead, O'Connor chooses to make all things clear by giving Sarah a beyond-the-grave soliloquy. And this is a little more than halfway through the book, when there's still the inquest and trial to go.Tough topic rendered in sluggish prose.

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