Frequent references to Victorian sexuality—from the corset to nocturnal emissions of ectoplasm—contribute to the work’s saucy sense of humor, as well as a larger statement about the role of Spiritualism in the history of women’s emancipation. As the narrator points out, seances and other such performances allowed women to speak publicly and subvert patriarchal social norms.

— Jess Jensen Mitchell, Full Stop

This book – atmospherically interspersed with collages by Selena Kimball – stays with you long after the seance is over.

— Mathilde Montpetit, The Berliner

Presented as a serious account—albeit with a healthy amount of wry humour—of the role of this somewhat mysterious medium in the early years of spiritualist practice, the portrait that emerges is of a woman for whom the boundary between the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh has become somewhat permeable.

— Joseph Schreiber, roughghosts

What is not strange, what feels contemporary about this fictionalized biography are the reasons why almost any woman without economic and social security would become a medium: In their “trance” stage, with spirits speaking through them, mediums could say things to their guests they otherwise couldn’t get away with. A woman could be “odd” and not have to worry satisfying a whole set of social conventions that otherwise would leave her destitute.

— Tom Bowden, Book Beat

Surreal, funny, unnerving, thought-provoking and a wonderful read from beginning to end, The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks is a marvellous book and I highly recommend it!

Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings

Agnieszka Taborska, otherwise innocent, has, during her annual pilgrimage into “the murky back-streets of Providence,” shamelessly consorted with the spirits of such infamous locals as Poe, Lovecraft, and Hawkes, giving spiritual birth to the charmingly eerie nineteenth-century medium, Phoebe Hicks. Phoebe’s story, which, the author says, “seems to belong more to dream than reality,” is a delightful postmodernist mix of fiction and history, hovering delicately between parody and mystery. Taborska’s fictional character Leonora de la Cruz makes a guest appearance, Harry Houdini challenges Phoebe to a kind of duel, and Alain Resnais, we’re told, had intended to make Phoebe the heroine of his 20th-century film Providence, scared off perhaps by her “disturbing ambiguity.” Phoebe is by turns a genuine communicant with the spiritual world, a fraud, an artist, a feminist, a psychiatrist, a lunatic. She can also be, thanks to her ethereal deadpan humor, very funny.

— Robert Coover

Agnieszka Taborska and artist Selena Kimball’s fictional heroines are clairvoyant women whose internal visions are projected externally through art and are conditioned by the scientific contexts of their eras.

— New Literature from Europe

It turns out that spiritualism is not so far from surrealism as it might seem. The surrealists, using their imagination, tried to break the shackles of social order, abolish the binding rules, and get out of the roles imposed from above. This transgressive element is equally important in the case of spiritualist séances, as Taborska notes, such a séance could be for the medium "entering with impunity roles inaccessible to her in waking life."

— Sarah Nowicka, Art Papier

It is a story about women's powers, or the career paths available to women at that time. About the eroticism hidden behind Victorian morality. About our desire for the extraordinary.

— Kinga Dunin, Journal of Opinions

The spirit of surreal eeriness seems to coexist quite well with the ghosts that haunt our heads as well.

— Mark Zaleski, Biweekly.com