House of Velvet and Glass, The CD ISBN 9781401326265 Ex library audiobook. The CDs are in Like New condition. House of Velvet and Glass, The CD Audio CD ? Unabridged, April 10, 2012 by Katherine Howe Brackish Water 5.0 out of 5 stars Transporting story of grief, magic, and tragedy. Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2012 Verified Purchase Like many of the people who reviewed this book, I also was drawn to it because I enjoyed Katherine Howe's earlier book, "The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane" so much. This was a brilliant novel, and entirely different from her first work. I was amazed at the talent of Howe to write in an entirely different direction with such success. The House of Velvet and Glass began slowly, in a time of mourning. I was struck by the quiet, empty house feeling, the attention to keen details. It was like I was walking through a stranger house, dragging my hands across furniture edges and taking in all the textures. I could breathe the air of the place, and smell the cooking in the back of the house. This sense of being transported existed through the whole book, like the first few chapters built the doll house before the figures themselves became alive. The stories woven through the book were beautiful, and the weaving didn't detract - but gave a pleasant rocking, like standing on a boat in calm waters. There were love stories that crossed class and age. There were violent stories that mangled and killed. There was a family struck by addiction and sorrow. And there were amazing Sea Faring adventures. It gave an earnest history of the time, and the feelings then, when the break of modernity was crashing hard on the century. The main character, Sibyl Allston, is 27, and considered past her prime. We'd hope that this spinster-profiling in her late 20's is a shock to all contemporary readers, but single women now can all relate to the judgement she feels, the awkward things said to her in public, and laugh out loud as I did at the victories over her contemporaries, and finally, be thankful for Howe's choices of book endings. Mainly though, this book is one about grief. About a person's greif, a family's grief, and the grief of a country after a great tragedy. This novel crafts feelings so accurately that you are pulled deep into Sibyl's despair, and are thankful to heal with her. The conversations about fate and free will never read like they're happening for your benefit, but still lead you through the dark cloud of the early twentieth century, and without the dependance on opium. The magic of the novel doesn't come from the scrying or fantastic things described, but the way the reader is magically transformed, and brought to tears and laughter, not just read about characters. The magic is that the book itself is a way to see another time, view things that happened to people like us, and be left with our own visions of how the world spins, a hundred years after this novel is set, in the wake of our own tragedies.