Book Review: "The Devil and Mrs Davenport" by Paulette Kennedy

I am more than open to reading anything by Paulette Kennedy as she was the woman who penned the incredible novel 'The Witch of Tin Mountain'. I am not going to lie when I say that was one of the most immersive books I have read regarding witchcraft in a very long time with an ending which was just fantastic and super-intense. When I found out that this book was cheaply available on my Kindle, I went for it (you know, I'm trying to save money here). 'The Devil and Mrs Davenport' starts off in that usual way I find Paulette Kennedy's novels to start - a woman is in strife internally and the men in her life dismiss her as being a bad woman. As this problem develops, she suffers abuse at the hands of these men instead of seeking out the reason for the development of the problem. Now, let's learn about how this applies to Mrs Loretta Davenport.

Loretta is married to the hypocritical and abusive Biblical History Assistant Professor, Pete Davenport. Her children are the sensitive but frustrated Lucas and Charlotte, who speaks her mind about hating the church when we all know she actually means she hates her unpredictable lout of a father. Loretta begins to experience something weird one day after learning that a girl name Darcy had gone missing. In her head, she can see herself being buried alive and knows somehow, where Darcy is. Darcy is ultimately found to have been buried alive in the exact place where Loretta said she would be. After this, Loretta's mind starts to go haywire.

She starts to see ghostly women, her dead mother, hear voices and static of some sort. Sometimes the visions are vivid and sometimes, they are faint but they are always present. She begins going to a doctor to hone her skills but when her husband finds out, he flies into a rage which almost results in him accidentally setting his wife on fire. He doubles down on the religion, convinced the devil has been let into his house and in what looks like hangover rages, he threatens things like whipping his daughter with a belt when she doesn't get dressed quick enough.

Loretta begins to act strangely in front of people. For example: at one point in the text she asks the mother of the dead Darcy about some pink animals that she could not have possibly known about. But whilst Darcy's mother and sister become a little bit on edge, Pete always steps in the hinder the investigation to anything further. One day, Darcy's sister, Dora, contacts Loretta and asks her about what she saw. Whilst the police are looking for just one man, Loretta insists that there were definitely two. As this begins to unfold, Charlotte can no longer sleep peacefully as a woman sits and weeps at the end of her bed every night. A woman who she swears is a ghost. The question is: has the devil invaded this house, or was he really just always there?

Paulette Kennedy's writing is brilliant. This book starts off in 1955 and you can really feel the atmosphere of the 50s: the empty glamour, the want for normality, the domestic violence being passed off as something absolutely normal etc. I feel like what Kennedy did here was create a world that was already on edge - the 50s were not particularly religious as say the middle ages but there sure was a lot of religious hypocrisy that was being passed off. As we know this would turn into the cult era of the 70s and people were now willing to accept these flawed people as messiahs. The world was already on edge and yet, people went about as if nothing was wrong, as if religion wasn't failing people and as if these people leading them were perfect. The whole thing about what happened behind closed doors was not just not thought about, people genuinely didn't care as long as they presented as good people to their own faces.

All in all, I found this book to be intriguing. It is classic Paulette Kennedy and her 'good for her' culture of novels. I love this book because of its ability to see the realities through the nonsensical culture of the church in the 1950s. If you're interested in how religion was bent to favour rich white men whilst basically damning everyone else to hell then perhaps investigate the mid-20th century church in America is for you.