Description: After fifteen-year-old Polly Kimball sets fire to the family farm, killing her abusive father, she and her young brother find shelter in a Massachusetts Shaker community called the City of Hope. It is the Era of Manifestations, when young girls in Shaker enclaves all across the Northeast are experiencing extraordinary mystical visions, earning them the honorific of "Visionist." The City of Hope has not yet been blessed with a Visionist, but that changes when Polly arrives and is unexpectedly exalted. As she struggles to keep her dark secrets concealed, Polly finds herself in a life-changing friendship with a young Shaker sister named Charity.
Brief description:
Ellen Archer has narrated numerous audiobooks and has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards, as well as the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She is an actress, and singer with a degree in opera performance from the Boston Conservatory. She has performed extensively on the New York stage and in regional theaters.
Review Quotes:
The Visionist is both a haunting, beautifully imagined tale of lives devastated by cruelty and transformed by love and a gorgeously evocative portrait of an 1840s Shaker settlement that is as startling as it is convincing.
-- "Cathy Marie Buchanan, New York Times bestselling author of The Painted Girls "