Secrets Are a Matter of Survival - an Editorial Review of "The Seer"

Book Blurb:

"A passionate, heartwarming novel that effortlessly imbues its historical setting with elements of magical realism...An engrossing, touching novel, perfect for lovers of women's fiction." --Kirkus Reviews

In 1890s Missouri, secrets are a matter of survival.

Clairvoyant Sarah Richardson screams as her older sister Katherine is forced into a straitjacket and thrust into a carriage bound for the St. Louis City Lunatic Asylum. She is devastated to learn Katherine has been blamed for her inadvertent role in an abused woman’s murder. Now, too frightened to speak up, she hides the truth that it should have been her in that carriage.

Sarah’s mounting guilt becomes too much, and she heads to St. Louis, determined to regain her sister’s confidence and prove herself worthy of forgiveness.

While working to heal their relationship, Sarah meets a timid housewife who tries to hide her bruises. When troubling psychic visions of the woman begin to affect her, she sees an opportunity to atone for her past mistakes. Desperate to do whatever it takes to make things right, Sarah embarks on a perilous journey that may cost her everything—including her own life.

Trigger Warning: This book contains topics of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and death.

Book Buy Link: https://geni.us/l7ZvQhx

Author Bio:

Raquel Y. Levitt has an affinity for the mid-late 1800s and sets many of her stories during that era, including her debut novel THE SEER about a young woman who risks her life and freedom to redeem a past mistake. THE SEER has received multiple accolades and awards, including the 2025 Literary Global Awards Fiction Book of the Year. Her short stories have been published in journals and anthologies, including the multi-award winning anthology FEISTY DEEDS: HISTORICAL FICTIONS OF DARING WOMEN. Many of her stories have a strong female protagonist finding her voice and her power. Besides being a writer, Raquel is an avid reader, book hoarder, world traveler, amateur nature photographer, cook, and collector of cool rocks.

An Editorial Review of “The Seer” by Raquel Levitt

5 stars from The Historical Fiction Company and the “Highly Recommended” Award of Excellence

There are families who inherit silver, or land, or a certain cast of cheekbone; and there are families who inherit silence. Sarah Richardson and her sister Katherine are born into the latter, into a house where curtains are drawn not merely against the sun but against knowledge itself. From girlhood they understand that what flickers at the edge of their sight, those luminous veils of colour about a body, that tremor in the air before a spoken lie, must never be named. To read another’s feelings is already dangerous; to confess that one sees beyond feeling into fate is to invite exile.

In The Seer by Raquel Y. Levitt, secrecy is not an ornament but a necessity, stitched into the hems of dresses and folded between the pages of family Bibles. The sisters’ gifts ripen as they do. What begins as a child’s uneasy intuition deepens into vision: colours bruise, shadows gather, and sometimes, too often, the shimmer around a neighbour curdles into the unmistakable stain of cruelty. It is one thing to perceive goodness, a soft gold that warms the spirit; quite another to behold the livid streaks of violence coiling about a man’s shoulders. Knowledge, in this world, is neither power nor comfort. It is a burden.

And so when Katherine dares to speak, when she insists that what she has seen within a certain household cannot be ignored, the consequences fall swift and merciless. The image of her, bound and carried into the St Louis City Lunatic Asylum, remains one of the novel’s most searing. A straitjacket becomes the era’s answer to inconvenient truth. In that moment, Sarah understands the lesson her father has tried to impress upon her: society does not forgive those who trespass upon its illusions. Better to preserve decorum than to expose rot.

Yet the genius of Levitt’s novel lies in the fact that Sarah cannot so easily amputate her conscience. Guilt gnaws at her. She possesses knowledge that might defend her sister’s sanity, yet knows too that no court, no priest, no neighbour would credit a tale of auras and clairvoyance. The injustice is double-edged: to speak is to condemn herself; to remain silent is to abandon Katherine. I felt this tension keenly while reading. Sarah’s reluctance never reads as cowardice; rather, it is the tremor of a soul who has seen the machinery of punishment grind too close to her own flesh.

When she leaves her childhood home and travels to St Louis, the novel broadens, as though a window has been flung open onto a restless city. The suffragette movement murmurs at the edges of drawing rooms; progress is discussed in parlours heavy with perfume, though seldom enacted. Sarah finds herself lodged at Digby’s Boarding House for Women, navigating the intricate etiquette of class. Her upbringing marks her as other, not quite polished, not quite wealthy enough, and she fumbles, as any sensitive creature might, beneath the appraising glances of those who have never doubted their place in the world.

Levitt renders these gradations of society with a delicacy that never feels didactic. Consider Laura, Sarah’s fellow boarder, whose standing within the house contrasts sharply with Sarah’s own. Or Rebecca of Larsen’s Market, who offers Sarah employment when her funds dwindle and with it the fragile security of respectability. At the market, work is not a shame but a necessity; hands are valued for what they accomplish, not how they appear when gloved. There, Sarah is met without suspicion. Friendship grows in the unlikeliest soil, among crates of produce and the honest rhythm of trade. In this humble space, she tastes a freedom absent from the boarding house’s brittle civility.

Yet even in this new life, the colours pursue her. St Louis thrums with human proximity; auras overlap and collide in the streets. It is not long before Sarah discerns the darkness shrouding Nathaniel Malone, a miasma too familiar to ignore, and the wan, trembling hue of his wife, Norma. The past reasserts itself. Katherine had once spoken of similar shadows, and for her trouble was declared mad. Now Sarah stands at the same precipice. To intervene is to risk ruin; to abstain is to collude with harm. The novel circles this moral question with exquisite patience, allowing us to feel the full weight of Sarah’s hesitation.

Throughout, Levitt’s prose invites the reader into the very texture of perception. One feels the oppressive density of a blackened aura, the strange ache of sensing despair before a word is uttered. The narrative does not hurry; it dwells. In doing so, it cultivates an intimacy that is difficult to shake. I found myself pausing, not from boredom but from absorption, as though I too must sift the colours in a crowded room.

Amid these darker currents, a gentler tint emerges, a blush of pink at the periphery of Sarah’s vision. Matters of the heart intrude upon matters of conscience. The man who awakens her affection brings with him a rare sense of safety, an easing of vigilance. Yet love, here as elsewhere, is complicated. He is not wholly free; attachment binds him elsewhere. Sarah’s longing is therefore threaded with restraint, her happiness tinged by the knowledge that desire alone cannot sanctify a union. The emotional palette deepens: hope, regret, yearning, all layered like translucent washes of paint.

What moved me most profoundly was Sarah’s intricate dance of self-concealment. To some she offers a palatable version of herself; to a chosen few, a truer one. Her life becomes a web of partial disclosures, each strand carefully measured. She yearns to stand fully in her own light, to declare without apology the totality of her vision, and yet the memory of her sister’s fate hovers like a warning bell. How does one live authentically in a world that punishes authenticity? The question reverberates far beyond the confines of the plot.

By the novel’s close, Sarah has not simply traversed a city; she has charted the treacherous territory between silence and speech, fear and responsibility. The Seer does more than entertain with its premise of clairvoyance. It interrogates the cost of perception itself. What is the duty of those who see? And what becomes of them when society refuses to look?

This book is difficult to set aside, not because it clamoured for attention with spectacle, but because it held me in a quiet, steady gaze. Its enchantment lies not only in the supernatural shimmer of auras but in the profoundly human struggle beneath them, the desire to protect, to belong, to love without forfeiting oneself. Long after the final page, Sarah’s colours lingered in my mind: the gold of kindness, the bruise of sorrow, the faint, resilient rose of hope.

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