Mr. Splitfoot

Starred review from October 12, 2015
Hunt’s ethereal third novel (after Orange Prize–finalist The Invention of Everything Else) is a nod to the mid-19th-century legend of the Fox sisters, mediums who conjured up a devilish spirit they called Mr. Splitfoot in order to separate the gullible from their money. The book deftly straddles the slippery line between fantasy and reality in a story that’s both gripping and wonderfully mystifying. Hailing from the Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission—a halfway house filled with damaged souls and run by a conniving religious kook—Ruth and Nat occupy their turbulent adolescent years pretending they can talk to dead people. When they reach 18, the two latch on to a mysterious benefactor who convinces them to use their skill for cash. Decades later, a newly pregnant Cora—Ruth’s niece—awakens to find the long-absent Ruth standing by her bedside and is whisked off on a wild goose chase across New York. Where they’re going and why, the mute Ruth won’t say. Hunt’s use of a split narrative to measuredly disclose snippets of Ruth’s past and Cora’s present in alternating, interconnected chapters builds suspense while keeping readers guessing about what crazy turn might happen next. Hints of what’s in store for readers include a cult of Etherists, a noseless man, a pile of lost money, and a scar-like pattern of meteorite landings. This spellbinder is storytelling at its best. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

August 1, 2015

Hunt's first novel, The Seas, got her named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 author. Her second, The Invention of Everything Else, was a finalist for the Orange Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. Now Hunt returns with a split-narrative gothic featuring Ruth, who as a young orphan channeled the dead and years later appears to her pregnant niece, Cora, to conduct her on a mysterious mission across New York State.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2016
As with her last novel, The Invention of Everything Else (2007), Hunt shows her skill in transforming the trappings of a factual story into a fantastical one more compelling and richer than the original. Mr. Splitfoot, loosely based on the Fox sisters, mediums from New York, revolves around Nat and Ruth, inseparable charges at the Love of Christ foster home. Revolting against the draconian and darkly whimsical Father Arthur, Nat and Ruth stage seances for the other orphans. When a traveling salesman, Mr. Bell, overhears them at one of the seances and offers to act as their agent, Nat and Ruth leave the orphanage, though they find new perils on the outsidein particular, a zealot who becomes infatuated with Ruth. Hunt moves between Nat and Ruth's story and events set 20 years later, when Cora, Ruth's niece, discovers she's pregnant, and Ruth, now mysteriously mute, silently leads Cora away from her home without saying where or why they are going. The narratives collide in a haunting finish. Nat and Ruth's seeming helplessness imbues the story with an eerie sense of danger, though Hunt expertly juxtaposes this against moments of tenderness and love. Motherhood, religious zeal, poverty, predation, and the frailty yet relentlessness of life are among the rich themes that Hunt explores here. Liberally deconstructed sentences, which to some readers may prove taxing, will for others be just the thing to activate the book's fantastical qualities.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)