The Mad Women's Ball by Victoria Mas

genre: historical fiction/paranormal

In 1885, if you are sent to the Salpêtrière Asylum, you can be certain that you will never come back out.  Women whose fathers or husbands have them committed will spend their lives among the "madwomen" and the only thing to look forward to is the ball, held once per year, where those who spend  their lives inside Salpêtrière get to mingle with those who are free to roam the streets of Paris.  For Geneieve, a nurse, and for Eugénie, a young women with an uncanny ability, the asylum will be the backdrop for the kind of pain and awakening that will forever change a woman's life.

This took me a lot longer to get into than I'd imagined, it's quite a short book but I wasn't immediately acclimated, I mixed up the characters a bit.  But by one fourth of the way through, I was hooked. The language (in translation) is so lovely.  I was so intrigued by the ideas here, about women's place in society historically, about the concept of "madwomen" and the tiny box of space women have been allowed to exist in before making their communities uncomfortable enough to need to shut them up or put them away somewhere.  It's sometimes a bit overwhelming to really consider it but this novel does a lovely job of making us think about it.  The paranormal aspect is a thin thread but also crucial to the plot, I was able to suspend my disbelief, especially knowing the power of the spiritualism movement during the time period.  This is strong historical fiction and I'm glad I kept with it.