Blindfold

In 1920s New York, a woman born with a stigma searches for identity in a world that refuses to see her clearly. Ellen Sydney has found employment at the Meadowburn household, where she occupies an uneasy middle ground: present but not quite belonging, serving yet not quite a servant. Through her unlikely friendship with the young Potter Osprey, we glimpse the quiet tensions of class and the invisible labor of those who keep households running while remaining unseen. The title Blindfold operates on multiple levels - what Ellen cannot see about herself, what society deliberately ignores, and the way we all navigate the world with pieces of our vision deliberately obscured. Orrick Johns, a poet who moved in the same circles as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, writes with the careful attention to language one expects from verse, yet this prose novel reveals his fascination with the spaces between people - the silences that define relationships as much as words do. The novel asks what it costs to be different in a world obsessed with normalcy, and whether removing a blindfold truly reveals truth or simply exposes us to sharper pain.