Welcome back to Behind the Scenes! If you’ve been following along with Death Casts a Spell, you learned the novel’s second major plot twist yesterday, which is…
The Jacoby family’s first baby didn’t die in infancy sixteen years ago. Rather, she was rejected because she had Down’s Syndrome. Her father swapped her with another baby (paying that child’s mother for the privilege), in order to preserve the illusion of a perfect family. The replacement baby grew up as Jeannette Jacoby, a wealthy daughter of the upper classes. Her sister grew up as Pearl, a beloved member of a far poorer family.
This—the rejection of a helpless baby, and the value her adoptive family found in her life—is the beating heart of this particular novel. It’s what the book is about in the philosophical sense: the fact that people aren’t valuable because of their health, their capabilities, or their ability to meet expectations. They are valuable simply because of who they are. In Christianity, we call this concept the Imago Dei—the image of God. Everyone bears it, which means everyone has intrinsic and inalienable value.
This concept is behind every one of the emotional stories in this novel—but it wasn’t always so. During the planning stages, I initially thought that the Jacobys’ baby would have died in infancy. They would then have bought a baby to replace her, in order to manage some business with inheritance—perhaps they needed to provide a grandchild to the elder Jacobys in order to be recognized in a will.
