The Visitors

Author/Guide: Rebecca Mascull

Why a Booktrail?

1800s: Imagine if you couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak… Then one day somebody took your hand and opened up the world to you.

ISBN: 978-1444765236
Genre: Fiction, Historical

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What you need to know before your trail

Adeliza Golding is a deaf-blind girl, born in late Victorian England on her father’s farm. She lives in a dark and solitary world for she cannot communicate like everyone else and so she retreats to the world and the ghosts in her head. The Visitors she calls them as they come to call and they tell her things that no -one else can hear….

Making friends one day by drawing with a girl, Lottie, who works on the hop farm, her world starts to open up.

But the voices in her head keep calling…

Locations

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Travel Guide

There are three main settings in this novel which each lead the story in a unique way. First is the solitary world in which Adeliza lives – hers is a world of darkness and confusion not to mention isolation –

“For many years, my deaf-blindness was like a monster from myth. Once I found language, the spell was broken and I assumed human form. One does not need sight and hearing to be fully human, only communication. My lack of sight and hearing were not the enemies, only my lack of connection was my monster, my isolation”

It’s poignant and sad to think of this world for anyone least of all a young girl. Working on her father’s hop farm we get to see a rural Kent in Victorian times and the hardships of working on the farm. A glorious scene at first but one with such struggles behind it –

“The oysters were spatting nicely, the hop flowers ripen in the Kent sun…..”

The hardship of those born deaf and blind in Victorian times is described and examined in poignant heartbreaking details and Whitstable, where many farms are located is seen through Adeliza’s eyes.

The third and most heartbreaking location is the whole landscape of the Boer War

“We often dig up newly made graves. I know this sounds ghoulish but the Boer women often hide weapons and valuables there.”

Shocking raw and evocative of real historical settings and the inside of a young girls mind. Poignant and makes you think.