The Istoriaphile’s Corner

We move through life so quickly. Children cram play-dates and lessons between study for entrance exams. Letters gave way to phone calls, then email and disappeared with video-chats and tweets. We create five-year, ten-year and twenty-year goals, power-walking our way through life and all we see is what’s before us. But is that all there is? Aislinn Hunter suggests in The World Before Us that what we sense in this accelerated life is the narrowest universe of all.  Jane Standen is the fulcrum of this story, a quiet woman with a disquieting past.  Years ago, she took a little girl into the forest and the child disappeared in the woods.  Nothing has brought Jane to terms with this loss and now she’s in a career that uncovers lost detail.  As an archivist, Jane works in a Victorian museum, cataloging the data and detail of an earlier age.   The museum’s closure and an encounter with the child’s father occupy her conscious mind.  It does not fill the conscious of the spirits that follow Jane, ghosts vitalized by her search of the past. These spirits narrate The World Before Us as they watch the present and Jane.  Disembodied but kind, they study…